Bleed For Me
by Meowmers
Summary: How strange, that her soulmate should be a book. How fitting. Tomione. Soulmate AU. M-Rated.
1. Chapter 1

Hermione's words have always been innocent.

Imprinted on her torso, curling around her side in beautiful, looped penmanship, she had traced and retraced them over and over ever since she first understood what those words meant. She saw them when she undressed for the shower, when she got ready for the day, at night when she laid down to sleep she would roll up the hem of her shirt so she could see them again, lay her hand on them and wonder, wonder, _wonder_ when she might hear them

 _How did you find my diary?_

She imagined how they might meet. The words were quite beautiful, and she didn't know any boys with penmanship that nice, so she thought perhaps it might be a girl. She didn't know any boys who would admit to having a diary, anyway. She imagined her, always differently—sometimes she was tall or short or thin or wide or long haired or short haired, black, brown, red, blue, blonde—she thought about her whenever she found a book that wasn't hers. She imagined turning to the cover and discovering its nothing more than a journal. She imagined meeting her—how did you find my diary—she imagined what she might say in return, what words wound themselves onto her soulmates skin—

But then of course, it could be a boy. She thought perhaps he may be someone very posh, Or maybe an architect—she read in a book that they had to take handwriting classes, but she wasn't sure they specialized in cursive—she imagined him sometimes, too. Always different—pale, dark, muscled, gangly, soft—but always the same words, always the same pleasant phrase that warmed her side and made her feel simultaneously terribly excited and terribly afraid—

 _How did you find my diary?_

Her parents told her when she was very young that the words meant little, if not nothing at all. Plenty chose to ignore them, tattoo over them—though they could never seem to be entirely hidden—while others searched and sought out their soulmate for years and years and never found them. She knew why they told her. Her mother's words that twined around her wrist— _It's terrible luck, really, but what can you do?—_ did not quite match up with her father's words behind his knee— _Don't you dare say that's because I didn't floss—_ But they loved each other more than Hermione had ever seen anyone love someone regardless. She understood what they were saying—just because someone doesn't say those words imprinted on your skin doesn't mean they cannot be meant for you in some other way, in exactly the same but _different_ way.

But still, she sits on the sink in her bathroom and pulls her shirt up and traces the shape of the letters on her ribs and dreams of him or her or whoever.

When she turns eleven she learns of magic, and suddenly its like every question she had never thought to ask has been answered.

She pours over books like Hogwarts: A History, she tries to learn everything she possibly can about magic and Hogwarts and even, a little bit, about the etchings into the skin around her ribs. She finds very little, other than they have always been there, and thus, they are. But her daydreams are more vivid and a bit more ridiculous now. She imagines Hogwarts and all the other students, she imagines in the hustle and bustle of students in a brand new school her soulmate might lose their diary and she might pick it up. Perhaps they'll meet in the library, she wonders? They'll see her sitting with their diary (she'll be sure to put it on display, so they see) and they might approach her and ask—

 _How did you find my diary?_

She wanted to see them write. She wanted to watch them write something, anything, an essay or a letter or a poem or a note—she wanted to watch the way their pen curls around their y's, the way they dot their i's, the overindulgent way in which they elaborate on the beginning of their sentences. She wanted to watch them write what was imprinted upon her, she wanted to watch them write it again and again and—

She's twelve years old when she finds the diary, but it isn't left on a desk or on the floor in the corridor, its in the girls' lavatory. And at first she's so absolutely excited—it must be a girl, she decided, it must be for her to find a diary in the girls' lavatory—but then she traces the name Tom M. Riddle on the spine and she wonders. She's not disappointed, exactly. She had never been bothered with the idea of her soulmate being male or female, but she is a bit bothered with the idea of a boy leaving his diary in the girls' lavatory.

She wonders what he looks like. She wonders what his voice will sound like. She had always wondered what her first words to him would be, she had always hoped it would be romantic, something pretty to be sketched along his arm or his throat or his shoulder blade—but at the moment the only thing she could think to reply with would be _What were you doing in the girls' lavatory?_ and she really didn't think that was a nice thing to have written on your body, so she tried desperately to think of something else, something sweet, something pretty and romantic—

But Ginny watched her walk into the common room with the diary in her hands and Hermione swore she looked terrified.

"Hermione," Ginny called once Hermione reached her room. She had followed her. "Give that to me,"

"Why?" Hermione asked.

"It's just—it's mine—" Ginny started. Hermione narrowed her eyes, feeling a bit territorial over what very well may be her soulmate's diary.

"No it isn't," She argued, "It says it belongs to Tom M. Riddle."

"Hermione— _please_ —just—give it to me, it's—it's—"

"Ginny," She said, carefully now because there was something horrific in Ginny's expression that Hermione had never seen before on a child, sometimes adults, sometimes Harry, but never someone like Ginny, "What is it?"

The red-headed girl hesitated, her eyes welling up with tears, "I—I—"

"You know you can tell me," Hermione said calmly, "Right? You know you can tell me what's wrong. I can help."

Ginny shook her head, "No you can't,"

Hermione paused, looked down at the diary which should lead her to her soulmate, to the words etches on her ribcage, then back at Ginny. "Why are you afraid?" She asked.

The younger girl's breath quickened, "It's—"

"Come here," Hermione ordered gently, sitting atop her bed and inviting Ginny to sit next to her. She pulled the curtains closed around her bed, kept the diary firmly in her grasp, "Why are you afraid?" She asked again.

"The muggleborns…" She started slowly. Hermione felt herself leaning in to listen closely, "It was—it was me."

Hermione furrowed her brow. "What?"

"The diary…it made me—"

"Ginny, this is just a diary—"

"No, it isn't!" She snapped, reaching past Hermione, digging in her bag without asking to fetch a quill and holding it out for Hermione to take. "Write in it and it writes back—Tom writes back, and he—I thought he was my friend, I didn't realize, but he—"

Hermione took the quill from Ginny's shaking fingers, reaching into her bag to pull out her ink as well, dipping the quill in and opening the diary. She noticed Ginny's complexion pale as she watched, and she paused, glancing between the terrified girl whom she had never truly spoken to before this moment, and the diary in her lap.

"Hermione—" Ginny choked, and Hermione glanced down to see a drop of ink had hit the page. She watched in avid fascination as the ink sank into the page and disappeared.

And then she watched in abject horror as her words appeared on the page in beautiful, looping letters.

She had always expected to be a bit nervous, perhaps a bit afraid, when she first heard the words. But then she had always assumed she would hear them, not see them spell themselves in front of her. And in a diary that a girl claims has opened a chamber and targeted muggleborns since the year started, she saw them slowly stretch across the page—

 _How did you find my diary?_

She snapped the diary closed.

"Ginny," She began sternly, desperately, "I need you to tell me everything— _everything_ —"

She did. She spilled her secrets that she had spilled to the diary before, she told Hermione of Tom's smooth words and the way he comforted her and talked to her—and the more horrifying things, the part she played in the fate of the muggleborns around the schools, tracing messaged on the walls in blood, waking and washing the red from her hands and hoping and praying it wasn't what it looked like—

Hermione felt like she couldn't breathe the whole time. She was horrified on Ginny's behalf, of course, but also—it had been his handwriting. His handwriting lined her ribs, stained the skin of her side, and no longer did she feel warmed by the markings but instead she ached, she felt dirty, sullied by the words scorched into her skin.

But they weren't said to her. They were written to her. That was different, right? That was separate, wasn't it?

"Ginny," She said as calmly as she could once she was able to speak, "It'll be alright. I'll help you—I'll…" She hesitated, "I won't write to it, in case it tries to control me, but I'll find out how to destroy it."

"Do you promise?" She asked.

"I promise." She assured her, "Absolutely."

She kept the diary hidden away in her trunk. She never told anyone else she had it. After a week, she lied and told Ginny that she had destroyed it and there was nothing to worry about any longer. But the truth was she was trying to discover who—or _what_ —he was. She poured over books in the library, tried to discover how he lived in a diary, how he had controlled Ginny, how he had petrified those students—

It was a Basilisk, was the first thing she discovered. The Chamber of Secrets, which had been announced in blood on the walls by Ginny's hand, must've been somewhere near the girls' lavatory where the diary had been—and also where Ginny said she awoke washing blood from her hands—though there was no way for Hermione to know exactly where. But she still had no idea how Tom Riddle lived in a diary, or who he was—

Until, that is, she caught sight of his name in the trophy room.

Tom Riddle, it said. 1942. Special Award for Services to the School.

Tom Riddle. 1942.

1942.

"I saw him once," Ginny told her, late one night when she couldn't sleep. Hermione often stayed up with her that year, when Ginny was kept up with nightmares. She never spoke explicitly of what happened, but Hermione thought it must be terrible. It made her feel sick to think that his words could be scorched into her side—

But they weren't his words. He had only ever written them. He had never said them. So it didn't count.

"Did you?" Hermione asked carefully, uncertain if Ginny wanted to elaborate or if she was only filling the silence.

"He was so handsome," She told her, "He was so…beautiful. And his voice…I think I fell in love with him a little."

"Did you?" Hermione repeated, having nothing else to say.

"Well, I don't know," Ginny said quietly, "I always just loved Harry, but Tom reminded me of him sometimes, and—" She stopped suddenly, her cheeks reddening as she lifted her eyes from her lap to meet Hermione's gaze, "I didn't mean—'

"I won't tell him," Hermione assured her, "Harry has no idea. Boys are stupid about that sort of thing."

She hesitated. "I don't have his words," She said after a moment.

"That's alright," Hermione assured her, "Words don't mean anything. My parents don't have each other's words and they're still in love."

"Truly?" Ginny asked. Hermione hummed in response. She paused for a moment, before swallowing thickly and boldly asking—

"How did you see him?"

"Who, Harry?" Ginny asked.

"Tom." Hermione clarified evenly. Ginny frowned and remained silent for a very long time. Hermione thought perhaps she had taken a step too far—she usually tried to avoid asking her questions, because Ginny rarely liked to talk about it. She had just come to terms with the fact that she was not going to answer when she did.

"Blood." She said. "He told me he just needed a drop. So I could see him."

Hermione didn't answer. Instead she laid a hand on Ginny's hand to try and comfort her, because something about that answer had darkened Ginny's expression. Hermione couldn't help but think that this Tom Riddle fiasco was far too dark of an experience for an eleven year old to bear.

It was probably too much for a twelve year old to bear, too, but that didn't stop her from locking herself in a bathroom stall and holding a pin in her hand, staring down at the diary and wondering if it was far too reckless and far too stupid to drop her blood into the diary to meet him, to hear him speak, to find out for certain if those words were his.

She decided it was, in the end. But she also decided—if his written words were apparently potent enough to burn themselves into her, perhaps if she wrote back, her words would be on him, too? What better way to discover if it was truly him than to discover, via his reaction, if her words were his just like his were hers?

She sat there for a very long time deciding what to say, but there was nothing she could decide upon that seemed specific enough, unexpected enough for it to leave no question to him nor her if they were soulmates or not.

So she didn't say anything. Not yet.

Not for quite a long time

—

Hermione bore the weight of a life without a soulmate with all the grace her parents did. It wasn't exactly the same situation—her parents had never met their soulmates to begin with, she _had_ , but she just had no idea who he was or exactly how evil he was. She refused to let anyone see her words, dutifully avoiding the subject when the girls would stay up late talking in the dorm-room, sharing their words and giggling about who it might be. Hermione would listen quietly and think of the diary she kept hidden at the bottom of her trunk.

She never wrote in it. She still hadn't thought of what to say. She still wasn't sure it would be prudent to say anything. She had come to terms with the fact that, somehow, those written words were enough to stain her skin. She assumed, as he was trapped in that diary and the only way he could communicate was by writing, it made their written words as potent as speaking. How strange, that her soulmate should be a book. How fitting.

"Don't you ever wonder?" Lavender Brown asked her one night while all the girls were sat upon her bed. Ginny wasn't present that night, spending time with girls in her own year. "Don't you want to know who it is?"

"It doesn't matter who it is." Hermione replied primly, "I can fall in love with whomever I want. Just because I have someone's handwriting scorched into my skin doesn't mean I have to wait for them."

"Scorched?" Parma echoed, "It's not as if it was burned into you."

"It was," Hermione argued, because for her it certainly felt like it had, it felt like a stain, it felt like a trick or a prank, something horrible tattooed on her side to remind her that apparently she was meant to be with someone who was not only trapped in a book, but also controlled her friend in an attempt to destroy muggleborns _while_ trapped in said book.

She still wasn't sure how to destroy it. She hadn't actually tried.

She found the longer she left it hidden in her trunk the angrier she felt at the thing. She had been so excited about the prospect of a soulmate, her childish imagination running wild thinking about who she might meet, who she might fall in love with. The idea that her soulmate was a book who hated her for her blood—a prejudice that always sent her apparently dirty blood boiling—what a horrible trick of fate.

It took only that single conversation for the other girls to stop asking her about her words. Ron asked her once, but she had lectured him on the unimportance of soulmates for so long that he had never asked her again. Harry never asked, but she attributed that to the fact that he never spoke of his own words either, for some reason. Outside of her friends within her house, soulmates were not a conversational starter, so she needn't worry about anyone else's interjections or questions about her words. It was easy to ignore, really. But it was impossible to forget.

She had come to something of a standstill in her research as of late. The first few months of researching , it had been revelation after revelation but upon learning of Tom Riddle's identity, she found herself at something of a standstill. She couldn't ask Ginny questions, because not only did she react quite poorly to being asked about Tom Riddle, there was also very little she remembered in the first place. She was hesitant to talk to Harry about it yet, mostly because he just seemed so relieved that the voices had stopped, and she didn't have the heart to tell him that it wasn't completely over.

"It's been months," He said once to her and Ron, "And no voices, no messages about the chamber of secrets." He looked squarely at Hermione when he continued, "Do you think it just…stopped?"

"I can't imagine what they would be waiting for." She said, "It must be over…why else would they stop?"

"It's bloody suspicious," Ron interjected, "I mean—what happened to stop it?"

Hermione almost told them, then. She almost told them she was in possession of the diary which prompted the basilisk to attack—she almost told them about the Chamber and the Basilisk and Tom Riddle and Ginny, but a myriad of reasons held her back. She had promised Ginny her secrecy, first of all. There was also the aspect that she had no idea how to destroy the diary yet, she had no idea exactly what the diary was. And then of course there was also the fact that she was fairly certain that leather-bound book was her soulmate, and she had yet to discern if that was entirely true or not.

So she didn't say anything. They sat there in contemplative silence and she said nothing.

"Perhaps something happened to the heir?" Harry suggested.

"Whoever that is," Ron mumbled.

Hermione paused.

"Heir…" She said quietly to herself, "Enemies of the heir—muggleborns and—and the heir of Slytherin can control the—damn it!" She slammed her hand down on the table and both Ron and Harry stared at her in shock, watching her with wide eyes in silence. She didn't often swear—she never really did—but all of her research was suddenly connected with that blasted term—heir—and she felt terror seep into her bones.

"Hermione—" Harry started, but she had already left.

In her absence, Ron and Harry sat in shocked silence until Weasley finally muttered, "She's bloody lost the plot," to break the uncomfortable quiet.

They didn't say anything else to address her outburst.

—

Hermione sat in the library surrounded by books filled with destructive spells staring at the diary sitting in the center of the table, mocking her. She felt simultaneously terrified and furious.

In all her research, she was surprised now that she had never made the leap. She knew of the Basilisk, she knew it was targeting muggleborns, she knew it was controlled by the heir—the heir that she had gathered must be the heir of Slytherin, especially considering they dealt with the Chamber of Secrets, which was a chamber supposedly created _by_ Slytherin—she knew that the only people on this planet who she could think of who would be able to control a snake would be someone who could speak to it, like Harry or—or—

She picked up the diary and slammed it back on the table for no reason other than she was furiously angry.

Voldemort. Somehow, _Voldemort_. She didn't know how she _couldn't_ have known, how she didn't make the connection—A man who can talk to snakes and hates Muggleborns, tries to eradicate them from the magical world—

Everything was clearer in hindsight. At least she thought that was the saying.

She checked out every single one of those books she had pilled around her—dutifully ignoring the odd look the librarian sent at her—and struggled to carry the books up to her bed, where she immediately spread the books across the bedspread and pulled her curtains shut.

"Incendio," She tried, pointing her want at the diary. Nothing happened, so she read over the page against and tried once more. "Incendio," Still nothing. "Incendio!" She said a third time, and finally angry flames spilled from her wand and hit the diary, but they also hit the blanket, and it took her two terrified tries to cast aguamenti to stop her room from bursting into flames.

The diary had flipped open, she realized with terror, and she watched as the burnt edges of the pages slowly healed until it looked as if she had never even cast the spell. And slowly, that beautiful script faded onto the page— _Have I done something wrong?_

"Oh, you horrid, evil—" She muttered, picking up the diary and trying to rip the pages out, but as hard as she pulled at the pages nothing ripped, nothing tore, nothing broke. But in her struggle, the harsh edge of the parchment slit into her finger and she dropped it in horror, watching the blood on the corner of the page soak into the otherwise unblemished pages.

 _Would you tell me what I've done wrong before you try to destroy me?_

She stared at it, wide-eyed, wondering what she had done.

 _Why don't you write?_

She slammed it shut so it—he—would stop speaking to her. She didn't know what this—this _thing_ was, but judging by how hard it was to destroy she could tell it was certainly more than a go between from Voldemort to whomever finds it. It was something worse, something darker—she gets the distinct feeling that it may even be somewhat separate from Voldemort—but still him, wasn't it? It must be him, and his words and his handwriting were tattooed on her side like a branding, like a stain, she _hated_ it, she hated it more than _anything_ else, and she hated him, she hated fate, she hated this stupid, stupid, _stupid_ soulmate drivel—

She kicked the diary into her trunk by her bed, she stacked all the book she owned—not the library books, because she would have to take those out otherwise—until the diary was trapped at the bottom of her trunk where it could rot forever for all she cared.

She never pulled it back out, except for one time where she put it in a little box and locked it so she would never have to touch it again, even if she had to empty her trunk. She tried and tried and tried to forget about it. Some nights she would stand in the shower or the bath and scrub and scrub and scrub her side until she bled, but she never retrieved that journal.

Until she did.

—

Hermione was barely fifteen when she hears her words again.

" _How did you find my diary?"_

But it wasn't really again, because she had never heard them in the first place, only saw them written on a page. The shock of hearing them was so severe she felt every muscle in her body coil as if to fight, as if to snap back at something offensive because—she had accepted her situation. She had come to terms with the fact that fate—for whatever reason—decided that her best match would be evil incarnate, and she had accepted fate's opinion but promptly told it go fuck itself. She was content living a life as her parents did, with someone else, someone she might not match but someone she was content with just the same. She had _accepted_ it.

And she had more important things to worry about, she had to worry about the fact that Harry's name had just been spat out of the goblet and he would be competing in the Tournament, she had to worry about the fact that Ron was being a prat and refusing to speak to him—

But she hears them.

" _How did you find my diary?"_

They're soft, and feminine, and french-accented. The voice winds its way pleasantly through her ears and suddenly every hope she had as a child came springing back as if the incident with the diary never happened, as if her words weren't an insult and a secret—

She wanted to say something beautiful in turn. She wanted to say something lovely to print on her skin. But she balked for a few silent moments while Fleur watched her, half patiently, half concerned, her pretty hands plucking the book from Hermione's hands that she had only just picked up off the ground.

"I—I—" She stuttered briefly, "It was just—on the ground." She internally winced at how lame that was, how lame that would look on her skin. Fleur showed no reaction, however, showed no sign of recognizing the words. Hermione felt something deflate inside of her.

"Thank you," She said graciously instead, a beautiful smile stretching across her lips, "I don't have many secrets, but I still would hate for anyone too nosey to find this."

"I—I'm sorry," Hermione started, knowing that what she was about to ask was terribly intrusive, "This is going to sound very rude, but—your words…"

Her eyebrows lifted high on her forehead, "Did I say yours?" She asked. Hermione nodded. "Oh, you did not say mine," She said with an apologetic tone, her eyebrows drawing together in something like pity. Hermione couldn't even truly find it in herself to be disappointed, the fact remained that she had _said_ her words, she had said the exact words printed on her side and it had been a coincidence.

A _coincidence_.

"That's alright," Hermione smiled, "I don't care much for them anyway, I was only curious."

"You do not care?" Fleur asked, surprised, "Not at all?"

"I don't like being told who to love," Hermione offered flippantly. "Particularly if its someone terrible."

"Terrible?" Fleur echoed with a slight laugh, "Well I believe the point of the mark is, if they are terrible, they are not terrible for you," Hermione felt something quite literally constrict around her chest, and she wasn't certain Fleur knew how much worse her words made everything. It was a joke, sort of, Hermione knew that based on the tone, but if it were true and her soulmate was that blasted diary then she certainly was not about to differentiate between how terrible it was for the world and how terrible it was for her. She didn't want a soulmate that forced her to decide between herself and society.

But she heard her words again, didn't she?

Something desperate and hopeful was beginning to bloom in her chest, straining against the ropes that had constricted around her lungs so she could breathe again. It filled her with a hope that she hadn't had in quite a while, a hope that felt almost childish in its resurface in her heart. She had come to understand that soulmates were unimportant, similar in many ways to the subject of divination which she so abhorred. She thought back on her childish fancy—tracing over her words with a skip in her heart—as exactly that; a childish fancy, a daydream that would never come true. But suddenly she wondered if, even if she never found her true soulmate, perhaps the words she had seen written on that page were not _her_ words.

Coincidence. If it had happened now, surely it could have happened then?

The moment was unimportant to Fleur. Hermione could tell by the way she had thanked her once more for finding her diary and walked off after a pleasant farewell, as if her world was not spinning around her. Hermione felt an array of excitement and fear and she knew she was being silly, reacting like this, but as unimportant as she saw all this soulmate business, the thought of not being linked to such a horrible man—even if it is only some sort of duplicate of that horrible man—made her feel more at ease than she ever had before.

There was only one way to know for sure, she realized. Only one way to truly set her mind at ease. She had to figure out if her words were on his skin.

She sat on her bed that night, reached into the bottom of her trunk and fetched out the little box she had locked the diary away in. She unlocked the box, carefully picked up the diary, opening it and laying it on her bed, the curtains drawn. Her heart was racing no matter how many times she tried to convince herself to stay calm, because she knew what this thing was capable of. She knew who it was. She knew who _she_ was, and how glad it would be to kill her if given the chance.

Something ridiculous, she told herself. Write something that makes no sense, something that could not be on his skin by coincidence. Something ugly, so that if he is hers, at least she can stain his skin with something horrible as some sort of small retribution. Something he would be embarrassed to show.

But she took too long to decide, her quill poised above the pages. A drop of ink fell, and just like before, she watched as the ink faded away into the page and words wrote themselves on the page.

 _Hello, again._

She gritted her teeth, willed herself to be calm. But it had been two years since she had last been around that diary, and she had forgotten that her blood lied within its pages. It started to glow. Her quill slipped from her shaking fingers and she wrapped her fingers tightly around her wand and moved away, pulled open the curtains to get far away from that offensive light, but before she could escape it seemed to engulf her.

And then she was…somewhere else.

Somewhere strange. A study, of come sort, lined with books along the walls and a large desk and a window, somewhere that might've been cozy if it did not feel artificial somehow. Colors were muted, as if there was some film over her eyes, or perhaps just terrible, terrible lighting, but she didn't see how that could be when the window at her side was so large. Everything felt unreal, cold.

And she didn't have her wand. Not here.

"Hello, again," A deep voice interrupted her examination of her surroundings, speaking slowly and indulgently as if savoring the words as spoken rather than written. She knew who it was before she turned around.

" _He was so handsome,"_ She remembered Ginny's words when she turned and met his gaze, _"He was so beautiful, and his voice—"_

He sat in an armchair behind her, one of his long legs crossed over the other. She thought that perhaps, if he was anyone else, he would be handsome. He was tall, she could tell even while he was in that chair, with sharp features and dark eyes and hair that fell in perfect waves across his forehead. He wasn't smiling, exactly, but his expression as still remarkably pleased, and the heavy weight of his gaze as his eyes slid from the top of her bushy hair to her toes made it nearly impossible not to squirm, but she managed.

Instead, she gritted her teeth and tried to look nonplussed. She almost did it, almost asked him where she was, almost demanded he let her out, but before she opened her mouth she remembered herself. She remembered her situation. No, she thought, no that would not do. She had to know, without a doubt. She couldn't leave this discovery up to coincidence.

"I wonder which of Ginevra's friends you are," He purred, his voice as smooth and lush as his handwriting, a deep, velvety sound that caused the hair of her arms to stand on end. "If I were to hazard a guess, I would say the bookish know-it-all that she was always so jealous of."

Hermione's jaw twitched, the mention of her friend and his blatant attempts to rile her setting her temper ablaze, but she remained silent. Slowly, one brow rose on his forehead, as if he had noticed her reaction, noticed that she was holding back.

"What was your name…" He murmured, "Hermione?"

She didn't like the way it sounded when he said it. He made her name sound dirty, just the sound of it passing his lips made her want to cut his tongue out so he could never say it again. She hated him, hated everything he was, hated the fact that he appeared before her as a boy when she knew clearly that he was a monster.

His eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, gauging her reaction when he continued, "The mudblood."

The calming breath she took in through her nose was louder than she intended. Something slow and close to a smile claimed his lips.

"You are the one who attempted to destroy me, then," He observed, "A valiant effort, if not poorly researched."

It was very well researched, she wanted to snap. It was entirely researched.

His head tilted to the side when she remained silent, and he rose from the chair. His hands were clasped behind his back as he slowly approached her. Let me out, she wanted to say, Get me out of this horrible place right now.

She almost did. That would be a strange first thing to say to anyone, after all, but she stopped. The fear of what she could possibly discover, of what could be proven right, was too much for her to handle and she couldn't find the strength to open her mouth. She glared viciously at him as he approached.

"She must've told you," He surmised, and the closer he got the more she could see that his eyes were nearly sparkling with mirth. He enjoyed this, she realized, he thought she was afraid. And she was, certainly, but he thought she was afraid of _him_. "And you decided to help your friend." He was mocking her, she realized, but she had been mocked quite frequently by Slytherins before, and she wouldn't rise to the bait now. "You wouldn't help her if you knew what she said about you."

She narrowed her eyes. He watched for a silent moment before his eyes dropped to her throat. "Ah," He said quietly, and his fingers rose so he could rest them against the red and gold of her tie, "But you are a Gryffindor, so of course you would."

She took a step back, slapped his hand away from her person and glared with all the ferocity she could muster. His hand remained in the air where she had slapped it away, and he stared at it for a silent moment before he lifted his eyes to meet hers again. She knew it wasn't possible, but it was almost as if his eyes had gotten darker.

"I was kind to her," He said calmly, but there was something decided chilly about his tone. Hermione huffed out a sarcastic laugh, turning her eyes away from his heady gaze for a moment, wondering if there was a way out, if there was a way back into her room and out of this blasted farce of a study. "It's very boring, having to listen to the silly troubles of an eleven year old girl, but I was patient." He continued, taking a step closer to her so that she was forced to meet his eye again, "I was sympathetic. She spilled her soul to me, told me all about her dear Harry Potter and the know-it-all mudblood he spent all his time with," She wondered, briefly, if he honestly thought that would rile her, if he thought confessing the jealousies of an eleven year old girl would make Hermione genuinely upset. She wondered if he genuinely thought she would care that the girl she now called her friend had once thought her distasteful.

"She _loved_ me," He continued, he stepped closer still and when she tried to distance herself she found herself pressed against the wall of books behind her. He smiled. "I find it fascinating how you refuse to speak," He observed, "I wonder if you would remain so silent if you knew everything I did to her," She felt like her whole body was swallowed up in ice, "Everything I made her do." She glared at him, wondered why she should be here without a wand, wondered how they could remain in this place that wasn't quite real, wondered if she would ever get out. In her panic, in the face of his soothing voice saying such horrible things, she was forgetting why she wanted to stay silent in the first place.

"Or how about what I planned to do?" He pressed, taking a step closer so that she could feel his breath on her cheek. She pointedly turned her eyes away, picking up on the fact that her silence annoyed him and so attempting not to give him even an iota of satisfaction from her attention. In the corner of her eye, she noticed his jaw twitch. "I was going to kill her," He said candidly, his eyes falling down to watch her hands curl into fists, "It isn't ideal, being stuck in this diary, so I planned to take every part of her soul she offered me, every drop of blood, so I could escape this prison and leave her to _rot_."

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath through her nose and told herself that his words didn't matter, he hadn't done it. Ginny was alive and any plans he had were over now.

"Perhaps, then I might've killed you," He hissed, and her breath was starting to come in quick, quit gasps when his hands found purchase on either side of her shoulders, caging her in against the wall of books but not touching her, making no contact except for the breath against her cheek. "Or perhaps I'll use your body, instead," She violently flinched when his nose lightly traced along her cheekbone, and she hated the fact that she was showing him how much he set her off, but she couldn't help it. The idea of him touching her made her want to throw up. "You made a dreadful mistake, offering that drop of blood, even if it was a mistake. I could use you now, finish what she started. Take your life instead?"

She squeezed her eyes shut and said nothing.

His hands suddenly slammed against the wall by her head, making her jump, causing her breath to quicken and her heart to race and, quite on accident, she met his eyes again. "Why don't you _speak_?" He hissed, his mouth twisted into a snarl that looked far to natural on his face, far more natural than the calm expression he had worn before. She liked this look better, liked it because it was less angelic and beautiful and more like the monster she knew he was. This was truer to his form, and it made her feel more in control to know that if she could do nothing else, at the very least she could strip him of his smoke and mirrors.

"Maybe I won't kill you," He continued viciously, excitedly, looking at her like the fact that she met his eyes was enough to make him continue, "Maybe I will take your body, but maybe I won't leave you dead, not yet," When he smiled, it was wide and cruel and horrifying, "I'll kill your _friend_ Ginevra with your own hands," He threatened, "Let you wake up drenched in her blood, and _then_ I'll kill you, so that the last thing you see before you die is your _pathetic_ friend dead at your own hands—"

She didn't mean to do it, but she was so fed up with being stuck there without her wand, with the way he was trying to intimidate her, with the viciousness of his words. So she snapped, she forgot her fear, she forgot everything except the vicious anger that had built up in her chest, and she spat, "Save your villainous monologue for someone who's afraid of you, _Voldemort_."

He didn't respond, not right away. For a long moment he simply stared, which would have been odd in and of itself but was even odder because his expression had entirely changed. She noted that he didn't show shock the way most people did. His eyes didn't widen, and his jaw didn't go slack. Instead his face went rather blank, even ounce of vitriol from the moment before flushed away in an instant, and he suddenly looked at her very differently. And she knew that look, that anger and terror and outrage mingled with the shock and the confusion, she had seen that look the first time she had discovered him, when she had glanced at her reflection and contemplated herself and her soulmate and everything that was _wrong_.

Oh no, she thought. Oh _no_.

"What?" He breathed, but there as still something oddly severe about his tone. "What did you say?"

"Let me out," She demanded, because she knew what this meant. She knew what his shock meant, it meant everything she had been hoping was a coincidence wasn't, it meant it was real. This man, this monster trapped in a book was her soulmate, her words were tattooed onto his skin just like his were on her ribcage. "Let me out of here, _now_."

His hands clasped around her arms when she tried to move away from him. It was the first time he touched her besides the barely-there graze of his nose along her cheek, and his fingers gripped at her so harshly it hurt. She jerked away, or attempted to, but only succeeded in pressing herself further against the wall. "What did you say?" He repeated, viciously, as if he didn't believe what he heard, as if he didn't want to.

"Let me go!" She demanded, panic welling up in her chest like nothing she had ever felt before. That shadow of doubt in her mind that she had before, the possibility that he wasn't her soulmate at all, it was gone now. In its absence, her heart was beating wildly out of control, her breaths coming so fast that she felt herself becoming light headed. She couldn't get enough air. She couldn't get enough—"Let me _out_!"

"Say it again," He commanded, speaking through clenched teeth, his nails digging into her arms. She shook her head, struggled in his grip but he was relentless, "Say it _again_."

"Let me out!" She commanded just as fiercely. The corners of her vision were fading, she realized, and for a moment she thought she would pass out. She didn't want to, she didn't want to be defenseless against this man, unconscious in his presence, but her breath continued to quicken and she couldn't see—

She realized, after a moment, that it was light, not darkness, that was clouding her vision. She thought she heard him say something, something vicious and displeased, but when the light faded she was on her bed and he was gone.

The bed was too warm. The diary was too close. She couldn't see past her fear and she couldn't think about anything but pulling air into her lungs, so she tumbled off the bed onto the floor, tucked her knees up to her chest. Her hands were shaking so badly and she couldn't stop them, so she threaded her fingers into her hair and clenched her hands into fists so tightly she felt the strain of it in her arms, felt the sting as she pulled at her hair. She rested her forehead on her knees and pulled painful after painful breath into her lungs. She wanted to cry but no tears would come, she wanted to scream but she couldn't make a sound, she wanted to get up and run around the room just to calm the spike in her adrenaline but she could do nothing but remain there on the floor sucking in loud, gasping breaths as her mind played his expression on repeat, the panicked, angry look in his eyes when she spoke.

She thought it would never end, but it did.

When her breath had calmed, when her heart was no longer painfully pounding against her chest, she looked up and around herself. She reminded herself that she was no longer trapped in that room with him. She was no longer in danger, not truly, not while she was here. She closed her eyes and let out a long, shaky breath.

"Hermione?" She heard a voice call, and she opened her eyes to see Ginny at the door. She was watching her closely, concerned, "Are you…alright?"

Hermione realized a moment too late that she had left the diary open on her bed.

The look of pure, unadulterated horror on Ginny's face was familiar. It was the same horror she had carried with her the majority of her first year, and Hermione threw herself up on shaky legs to grasp at the diary. He had written to her, but she didn't know what because she slammed it shut as soon as she could. "Ginny," She started, intending to explain herself.

"Hermione, tell me that's not what I think it is," Ginny begged, her voice soft and her eyes accusatory. But Hermione didn't want to lie to her.

"I can explain."

"You said you destroyed it!" Ginny snapped.

"I _tried_ ," Hermione stressed, "I didn't know how to do it, so I just…lied." Ginny was looking at her as if she had betrayed her, "I didn't want you to be afraid anymore—"

"So, what? You kept it? And—and _wrote_ to it?"

"I only kept it until I could find out how to destroy it," Hermione clarified, "And I never wrote to it."

"Then why is it _open_ on your _bed_?"

Hermione hesitated, "This is the first time I have ever—"

"Hermione!" Ginny cried, "Don't you remember what he did to me? Don't you remember how dangerous he is—"

"Of course I remember," Hermione snapped, "I would not write to him if it were not important, Ginny, I—"

"What could possibly be so important?" Ginny implored.

Hermione shut her eyes before she said it, the humiliation of the truth settling over her as she said, "He said my words."

Ginny fell silent. Hermione opened her eyes to meet her friend's gaze, watching the confusion pass over her face. Hermione took a deep breath and untucked her shirt, pulled it up to display the handwriting that ran across Hermione's side. Ginny paled.

"But that's impossible," She muttered.

"It doesn't matter," Hermione said quickly, "It truly doesn't, but I just had to know, I had to know if it was a coincidence—"

"But that's _impossible_ , Hermione," Ginny repeated a bit more desperately. Hermione clenched her teeth.

"It's not as if I'm going to fantasize a life with him," Hermione snapped, "I just had to _know_. I thought perhaps I was wrong and he wasn't, but I was right—"

"Hermione," Ginny interrupted, her eyebrows pinched quite tightly together, "You can't be—"

"I _know_ , Ginny, alright?" Hermione's voice had risen several octaves, her friend's blatant denial of what Hermione knew to be true was doing nothing to help calm her.

"That is a book." Ginny elaborated, "It's a—a diary with an evil boy, you—you have to have a _soul_ to be a soulmate."

Hermione rolled her eyes, ready to bite back that obviously that meant that there was a soul, because Hermione had not _imagined_ what had just happened to her, but she paused. Her mind started whirling, and she didn't hear Ginny calling her name in the rush of her thoughts.

It had to have a soul, she realized. She had spent all this time wondering what it could be, wondering how it could come into being, and she had never considered the soul, never considered the logistics of tying your very being to an object, linking your very soul to something—

"The soul," She muttered, "It's his—his soul, but it can't be all of it, not if Tom Riddle lived in 1942 and Voldemort—"

"What?" Ginny asked, looking very confused and very afraid. "What does Voldemort have to do with—"

"I have to go." Hermione interrupted, snatching the diary up from the bed and rushing out the door.

"Hermione, wait!" Ginny called, and Hermione thought she might've run after her, too, but she didn't reach her, or maybe she stopped trying. Hermione ran all the way to the library, ignoring the strange looks garnered from students in the hall. The diary remained in her bag, kept on her person so that she didn't lose it. She was so close, she thought, so close to finding out what that blasted thing was and finding out how to destroy it.

It would be dark magic, she knew. She wished she had spent a moment to get Harry's invisibility cloak to sneak into the restricted section because she certainly didn't have a note to allow her access, but she couldn't turn around now, not with the roar of her blood in her ears, not with her heart pounding against her chest—She was so close, she was _so close_ —

She couldn't wait to destroy that blasted thing. She couldn't wait.

But there was nothing outside of the restricted section that said anything about storing your soul—or a piece of your soul, as she was suspecting might be the case—in an object.

It just made sense. For her to be linked to that object, for it to be her soulmate, it must have a soul. But Voldemort had been killed by Harry, so for this diary to remain in existence, it must not be explicitly linked but instead, separate. A piece of him stored away in a safe place.

But what _was_ it, and how could it be destroyed?

"Excuse me?" She heard a quiet voice interrupt, and as she turned her eyes upwards to see who was interrupting her research, she instinctually pushed the diary to the edge of the table, away from their line of sight.

She knew him. He had been one of those announced to compete in the Tournament. Viktor Krum, if she remembered correctly. He watched her kindly, and she realized he was waiting for a response.

"Oh, um—yes?" She asked, "Did you need something?"

"I am sorry for interrupting," He apologized graciously.

"No, no, I—" She started, but stopped because he had been interrupting her panicked research.

"You seemed very…focused." He said lightly. Hermione thought of lying, of saying she had just been researching something for a class, but that felt strange to say. So instead she smiled lightly in reply.

"I'm just like that," She offered quietly. He met her eyes quietly for a moment.

"Well," He said, "I actually just wanted to ask if I could borrow this?" His fingers found one of the many books piled on her table, "If you do not need it—"

"Yes, go ahead," She sighed, "I read that one and it didn't have what I need anyway,"

He hesitated for a moment, before smiling and lifting the book in his hands. He had only just started to turn away when something like a lightbulb went off in her head.

"Wait—" She said, and he stopped immediately, turning back toward her almost as if he had hoped she would stop him. Hermione was too caught up in her idea to notice the hopeful look on his face. "You go to Durmstrang." She commented.

His lips stretched into a slightly bemused smile, "Yes." He affirmed.

"Could I—" She started, pausing momentarily because she wasn't sure she wanted to ask, "Could I ask you a question?" He paused for a moment, too, before nodding and approaching the table again. She took a deep breath, "I'm not sure if you'll know, but…do you know what it's called when you…put your soul into an object?"

His brow furrowed, and she wondered briefly if she might have made a mistake in asking him. She knew it would have to be dark magic—that's why she had asked him, because Durmstrang studied the dark arts—but she hadn't considered that it might be very strange and possibly even suspicious to ask. She expected him to snap at her.

Instead, he took a seat. "Why do you ask?"

"I don't like not knowing?" She offered tentatively, "And I've heard of it before," This was a lie, but it was better than admitted she was trying to figure out what her demonic diary was, "Of someone who put part of their soul into an object. I can't find anything about it anywhere."

"I don't imagine it would be anywhere among these books," He said seriously.

"Very dark magic?" She guessed.

"Very dark magic." He echoed. She licked her lips, feeling as if her mouth had suddenly become very dry. It had been a mistake to ask him, she realized. He thought she was either crazy or evil or both, she should have never— "It is called a horcrux."

Hermione paused. "Horcrux?" She echoed.

"We have not truly learned about them," He said, "But in passing…A horcrux is made when one splits their soul and puts their soul into something else."

"Anything?" Hermione clarified, "Like a book, or a…?"

"Anything," He agreed.

"How do you do it?" She asked, "How can anyone…split their soul?"

He hesitated before he answered, "I believe you have to kill someone."

Hermione lifted her hand to press it over her mouth. She turned her eyes away from him. It wasn't surprising, not really, that Voldemort might've killed someone in his youth. Her shock manifested mostly because she couldn't believe she was having this conversation, she couldn't believe she had asked him about this—what must he think of her, asking about horcruxes?

"Is there a way to destroy them?" She asked, then clarified, "The horcruxes."

"That I do not know," He admitted.

"You must think me horrible," She muttered, "Asking you about this—"

"No," He cut her off, prompting her to lift her eyes up to meet his. He looked very serious when he continued, "No, I don't."

At least he looked as if he meant it.

There was a loud noise to her side that mad her jump and tear her eyes away from Viktor to meet the irritating gaze of Draco Malfoy at her side where he had just knocked all her books off the table. She expected a rude comment, but he offered none. He seemed content with the mess he had left on the floor with the books, and offered a wide smirk as he sauntered off.

She rolled her eyes. "Does that happen often?" Viktor asked, staring after the blond boy.

"No," She answered, moving to the side of the table to pick up her books, "He usually harasses Harry. I think he saw me talking to you and couldn't help himself."

Viktor had moved with her to assist in picking up the collection of books off the floor. "I apologize then,"

She couldn't help the quiet laugh that escaped her, "You don't need to apologize," She said, a bit bewildered that he would apologize at all. He smiled in response, and she felt unexpectedly warmed by the expression. "I'm Hermione, by the way," She introduced herself. "Hermione Granger."

It took him quite a while to get the pronunciation of her name right, but she remained patient with him. She was happy that he seemed content to leave her questions about Horcruxes in the past, to continue a conversation that was much lighter and less suspicious. She was a bit flattered that he wanted to talk to her at all, if she was honest, but she welcomed the distraction. She had a name now, for what the diary was. She could find out how to destroy it.

She excused herself after a time, because as lovely as Viktor seemed so far, she couldn't shake the dark cloud that hung over her. She felt on edge and nervous and she still had to find Ginny and explain everything, explain that she would destroy it soon, explain that she was so close to getting rid of him forever.

But when she went to retrieve it from the edge of the table, it was gone.

It was _gone_.

—

 **IT IS SO DAMN HOT WHERE I LIVE and my a/c is SHIT and i am OVERHEATED and SLEEPY and GRUMPY 24/7! but there was a brief receive of the heat in my room and i knew I wouldn't have the energy to write a whole chapter of something so instead I finished this up, which I was already half done with!**

 **So….as my dumbass always says…..this was gonna be a one-shot….but here we are…..and its not a one shot**

 **ha ha? ? ? ? ha? ? ? hA? ?**

 **idk I know the soulmate AU is a lliiittttlle cliche but its GOOD CLICHE I think and I like stories where Hermione gets the diary? I know we only had a little Riddle, tbf, but coming up we r getting a whole lot more?**

 **SOMEONE PROMPTED THIS someone messaged me on tumblr and asked for a soulmate AU and…I made this? I hope its up to par to what you were expecting, my love who requested it! idk I'm kind of excited for this just because It's been a while since I wrote back in the hogwarts setting, I do a lot of AUs so idk I'm also embarrassingly excited about aggressively bisexual hermione ngl? u go girl**

 **also tbh idk if Durmstrange would ever cover horcruxes even only in passing but they study dark arts so u kno? maybe**

 **Let me know what you think? ? ? ? I'm definitely continuing this, idk how many chapters, so we'll see. I'll probably be focusing on finishing up School Days, which only has a few chapters left tbh, and also finishing Lurking, before I continue this, but idk honestly…let me know what you think? If you're interested? idk I feel like this Hermione finds the diary has been done so many times but I just really wanted to write the soulmate AU within the Harry Potter world rather than taking it sot of outside it in a total AU idk…..let me know if you're interested! I love the feedback you guys offer, and I really do read every review and take into account your opinions and what you think and what you hope will happen and stuff, I love reading it! You are all very nice to me and I love you all very much…**

 **Anyway! I'm gonna shut up now, and I hope you guys liked it and want more? idk….let me know!**


	2. Chapter 2

"It's not here," She muttered, her hands fluttering around the table, moving books about and feeling as if her heart was about to leap out of her chest. Viktor looked equal parts concerned and confused, "It's not _here_."

"Did you lose something?" He asked carefully, but she didn't even hear him over her panic.

"It's gone, it's—" She stopped, feeling as if she was choking, shifting the books on the table and hoping it had simply been hidden or buried when Malfoy had knocked them all off the table—

She froze. Malfoy.

She absolutely could not handle losing that diary, not when she knew what it was. Who it was. If that diary got into the wrong hands, everything they had avoided in her second year could happen again—the basilisk and the chamber—and if Riddle's words were more than simply an attempt to intimidate her, if he meant everything he said, then—

Voldemort's return.

"Uh—is everything alright?" Viktor asked. She must've turned her head rather quickly toward him, because he looked marginally surprised when she did.

"Sorry," She breathed, "Sorry—I'm so sorry, but I just—I have to—I have to go?" She didn't mean for it to sound like a question, not really, and she had been actually enjoying his company because he had been quite a valuable source of knowledge, but at the moment she was caught between her panic and her anger and she couldn't even think of being polite at the moment. His eyebrows rose, and he nodded quite quickly.

"Yes, yes of course," He said, and she got the distinct feeling that she may have offended him.

"I—we'll talk more later?" She offered unsurely. He paused and for a moment just stared in silence, looking oddly confused, as if he hadn't expected her to offer to speak to him again. If she was any less panicked she may have given him time to respond, but at the moment she felt a bit short on time, "I—I'll see you later, Viktor."

She picked up her bag and left him at the table surrounded by the books she left behind. Her mind was whirling, her heart beating strongly in her chest as she asked herself question after question: What did Malfoy want with that diary? Did he know what it was? She remembered a time when Harry and Ron had thought that Malfoy might be the heir of Slytherin himself—which of course she knew he wasn't—but did he know about the heir of Slytherin? Did he know about Tom Riddle?

She had to get it back. She had to find him and get it back before he did something with it.

Or what if he didn't know, she wondered? She certainly wouldn't assume he was innocent, but what if he had no idea? What if Tom manipulated him the way he tried to manipulate Ginny? It would be easier with Malfoy, she knew. All he would need to do was appeal to his hatred of muggleborns and Malfoy would do whatever he said, he would probably be honored to bring hell upon the muggleborn students of Hogwarts, and when that was done, would Voldemort kill him?

She hated Malfoy, but she couldn't stand by and let him be killed, even if he was an arsehole.

"Hermione!" She froze, recognizing the voice immediately and turning her head to see Ginny quickly approaching her. She didn't look angry, not really, not like Hermione expected her to be. She looked concerned, and another wave of panic rushed through her when she realized—

She could not let Ginny know she had lost the diary. She couldn't do that to her.

"I've been looking for you—" She breathed, "I was just about to go to the library—you can't just take off like that, not when—"

"It's gone." She said quietly. Ginny furrowed her brow.

"What do you mean its gone?" She asked lowly, and Hermione was suddenly aware of the ambiguity of her words, how close they were to the truth. She took a deep, shaky breath and shook her head.

"It's gone, I've destroyed it." She clarified. Ginny huffed and rolled her eyes, looking even more frustrated with her answer.

"That's what you said last time, and I found you writing in it two years later!" She snapped, "You expect me to believe you destroyed it in the time between now and when I last saw you?"

"I expect you to believe I am capable of destroying a diary in two hours, yes." She snapped back, and Ginny looked confounded.

"Two hours," She echoed, "It hasn't—has it been two hours?"

It was Hermione's turn to look suspicious, her eyes narrowing as she watched Ginny's eyes drift, unseeing over her shoulder. "What have you been doing?" She asked, noting the way Ginny's eyes snapped back to hers and she looked decidedly defensive.

"Looking for you." She said.

"For two hours?" Hermione challenged, "Two hours and you only just decided to check the library?"

"Shut up," Ginny snapped, "Let me see the diary then, if it's really destroyed."

"Why can't you just trust me—?"

"Because the last time I trusted you, you lied!" She said, much louder than probably necessary. Hermione found herself glancing around them to make certain no one was listening in, to make certain no one was around. "And then I find you on the floor having some sort of panic attack talking about how it's your soulmate—"

"He," She corrected, "The book is not my soulmate, it's not as if I was bound to the diary before he put his soul in it. I'm bound to him." Deciding she didn't like that wording, she shook her head and took a deep breath, "I mean—I bear his words, and he bears mine." Ginny's anger seemed to have quelled for the moment, her eyebrows drawn up at the inner corners in sympathy. Hermione continued before she could say anything, "I thought about what you said—about having to have a soul, and—I figured out what it was. It's a horcrux." Ginny's brow furrowed at the unfamiliar term, "And once I knew what it was, I was finally able to get rid of it."

The ginger-haired girl hesitated. "And it's gone?" She asked quietly. Hermione felt her chest constrict with the lie, but she stuck stubbornly to it.

"You're my friend," She said instead, "And I'll protect you. Whatever it takes."

Ginny still had that raw look of concern on her face, like she was both horrified and furious but not at her, not anymore, perhaps only furious on her behalf. When she did tear her eyes away, she turned to lean against the wall at their side, resting her head against the stone and staring blankly ahead. "I was so scared when I saw it," She said quietly, "I thought I was having a nightmare."

Hermione hesitated before raising her hand, resting it on Ginny's shoulder in a very poor attempt at comfort. "I'm sorry I kept it from you," She apologized, and she meant it. She was still sorry, and she was still keeping it from her, and she felt like she couldn't breathe because of it.

"I hated you so much before you found that diary," Ginny said, "Because I loved Harry and he only ever paid attention to you—"

"Harry and I were never like that," Hermione promised.

Ginny shook her head, "That didn't matter," She said, "I hated you." Hermione felt herself a bit confused by the conversation, wondering what Ginny's jealousy as an eleven year old had to do with anything.

"We're friends now." Hermione said, "It doesn't matter if you hated me before—"

"That's not—" Ginny stopped, worrying her lower lip. "I thought you were his soulmate. Because he wouldn't tell anyone his words, and you were always with him, and—I think he's known for a long time who his soulmate is. And he just doesn't tell."

Hermione still felt oddly lost. But she shrugged and tried to keep up with the conversation as best she could, even if she couldn't understand why Ginny wanted to talk about soulmates instead of the evil diary that she was lying to her about—"Soul mates are irrelevant." Hermione said.

Ginny turned her head to face her, looking very much as if she wanted to argue, but then she stopped. She shut her mouth and an expression overcame her that looked so close to pity Hermione felt as if she might be sick. Ginny hesitated, and Hermione knew exactly what she was thinking when she quietly agreed, "Yeah…I suppose you're right."

She didn't really want to talk about it. The affirmation that the darkest wizard of all time was her soul mate was still a fresh wound, something she didn't want to talk about. She may have suspected it for years, but to have it confirmed ripped open the hole she had just finished painstakingly stitching together. So, in an effort to be certain that she knew where she stood, she said, "It's over now." And Ginny looked as if she knew exactly what she meant.

"I know." She said, "I believe you, it's just…of all people."

Hermione bit her tongue so she didn't say anything rude in reply.

Of all people, indeed.

Ginny hugged her, then. Long and tight, her chin on Hermione's shoulder and her fingers digging into her shoulder-blades. Hermione tentatively returned it, because she had the distinct feeling this hug was more for Ginny's sake than for hers. It made her uncomfortable, made her heart beat fast in her chest and she felt so afraid that the younger girl would hear it. That she would find out she was lying, and whatever friendship they had built would be shattered.

When Ginny pulled away, she smiled, looking oddly relieved. And when she left, Hermione stood there for a long time, thinking of the hug and the way Ginny had truly meant it when she told her she believed she was telling the truth about the diary.

She would find it. She would get it back. And as soon as she had it in her hands, she would do what she should have done the moment she found it.

—

Hermione took three days to try and formulate a plan before she decided that, plan or not, another day could mean facing terrible consequences.

She would just need to get him alone. That would be easy. And then she could demand what he did with it—she would play ignorant, at first, at what it truly was on the off chance that Malfoy didn't already know. It was possible he had assumed the journal was hers, and taken it with plans of embarrassing her or something—he had gone out of his way to make 'Potter Stinks' buttons after all, he wasn't necessarily above petty _bullshit_ —so she would pretend she didn't know. If he knew, and if he said something, then…

Well, she didn't know what she would do. Threaten him? Maybe.

She just had to find a moment to sneak away from Harry and Ron, so they didn't find out—

"Hermione, you _promised_." Harry said, and she had almost forgotten that he had been trailing behind her through the corridor. Her attention had fallen on Malfoy's platinum blonde hear rounding the corner.

"Yes, I know I promised Harry," She snapped, "I promised you five minutes ago—I just need—"

"The task is tomorrow!" Harry insisted, grabbing her arm when she stood on her tip toes to peer over the throngs of students. "If I don't practice that—"

"It's lunchtime." Hermione insisted, "Just—go get something to eat and after—"

"I don't need to eat." Harry insisted. "I need to learn this spell."

She hesitated.

"A _dragon_ , Hermione." He pressed, green eyes large and pleading and his fingers keeping a tight grip on her arm so she couldn't run away. She cast a final glance in the direction she had seen Malfoy go, a vice around her chest.

"Fine." She agreed, "We'll work through lunch."

They worked clear through dinner, practicing the summoning spell so that Harry would have a fighting chance in the first task. She focused, mostly, pushed the thought of Malfoy and that horrible book and everything they could be doing—plotting or killing or—she focused on helping her friend, because that was important.

But the truth was there wasn't a moment that had gone by in the past three days that she hadn't been borderline-overwhelmed with anxiety. She never felt like she could breathe, even for a moment, her mind whirling around all the possibilities, everything that could be happening during every moment that book wasn't in her hands. Would Malfoy help Voldemort? Would Voldemort kill Malfoy? Did she just bring about the revival of the Dark Lord by losing a bloody book?

So despite Harry's praise when he finally seemed to start getting ahold of the spell, despite his words that it was all thanks to her, she knew that it was truly up to him. All she had really done was bring the books.

She didn't sleep that night, kept awake by the fear of what Malfoy could be doing right that moment as well as by her worry for Harry, thrown into a tournament which he had never planned on entering. But then, she hadn't slept much at all recently, so she felt about the same.

Evidently, she didn't look the same.

"Bloody hell, 'Mione," Ron cringed when she joined him on their way to the stands to watch the first task unfold. She was already scowling before he even finished, "You look like shi—"

"Yes, _thank you,_ Ronald." She snapped.

"I just mean—well—are you alright? You look tired—but not, I mean—"

"Please stop." She said shortly, fixing him with a particularly irritated glower that made his mouth snap shut. "I didn't sleep well—I've been worried—"

"I don't see why you're so bloody worried," He started, "If he didn't want to compete, then—"

"Oh for God's sake, do not start this now," Hermione snapped, "In fact, don't even be near me during the task, I might throttle you."

"'Mione—" He started.

"No." She said firmly. "I'll watch the task on my own."

She left him there, because she had enough on her mind without Ron's constant griping about Harry, as if he had chosen to be in this horrible tournament. She was sick of Ron's temper and his stubbornness and, while she could usually see past that most times, she was so swallowed up in her own panic that she found she had no patience for him.

It was good that she left him there, because if she had to listen to him say something stupid and ignorant about how Harry must've put his name in that Goblet while Harry was injured by the spiked tail of that dragon she might've punched him in the face.

Her only thought in that moment—which was odd in and of itself, as she hadn't had a single, isolated thought since she had lost that diary, her mind was always torn between subjects, between worries—was to get to Harry at the first aid tent set up for the injured participants.

She didn't get there.

She was pushing through the crowd that had begun dispersing since the task had ended, and when she broke through the crowd to see a mop of ginger hair enter the first aid tent. She hoped he would apologize for being such a git, hoped he would realize the danger Harry was in. She started quickly toward the tent in the distance, and it was her brief reprieve from the crowd that a pair of unseen arms locked around her torso and she was pulled, quickly an unceremoniously, under the stands.

She kicked out her legs, because that was currently the only limb free to flail, and struggled to retrieve her wand from her pocket to turn it on whoever had pulled her out of sight, but a rough cry of ' _expelliarmus_ ' from somewhere to her left told her that her assailant wasn't alone.

And she recognized the voice.

"Malfoy!" She seethed through gritted teeth, glaring at the blonde boy to her side, and whoever was holding her from behind turned to face him,"What is the meaning of—" She managed to jerk out of the boy's hold behind her for a moment, before those thick arms wrapped around her once more. It must've been Crabbe, or Goyle.

"Bloody Hell, Goyle!" Malfoy sneered, his voice an octave too high. He had flinched quite violently when she nearly escaped, and she watched as he pocketed her wand. "Keep a better hold on her, will you—"

"What the hell is going on?" Hermione demanded angrily. Malfoy cast a worried glance at her side, and when she turned her head she saw Crabbe at the opening that led to the underneath of the stands where they had pulled her. It looked as if he was keeping watch, making certain no one overheard.

So she screamed, "Help! Somebody—"

"Goyle, shut her up you big oaf—"

Goyle shifted so that one arm held her still, her arms pinned to her side, and the other large hand clasped over her mouth. She glared at Malfoy with every ounce of vicious anger she could while he approached her.

He reached into his bag and pulled out the diary.

Her eyed widened, and she gave a particularly vicious jerk in Goyle's arms. "You know what this is?" Draco asked, unnecessarily, given her reaction, he opened it to a random, blank page and dropped it on the ground near her feet. When he stepped a bit closer she lashed out with her legs to try and kick him. "Merlin, Goyle—do your job and keep her still!"

"I only have two hands!" Goyle snapped back.

"You must've said something pretty damning, for him to ask for you, mudblood," Draco sneered, as he avoided another kick of her legs. She felt her breath stutter against her will, watching him wide-eyed. She had her answer about Malfoy's knowledge now—he knew what it was, and who it was, and—

"What?" She spoke against Goyle's palm, but it only came out as a muffled squeak, her voice too high in her panic.

Malfoy reached for her arm, pulling it from Goyle's grasp and stretching it out, so she kicked him in the shin.

"Shit!" He swore, moving to her side and beside Goyle where she couldn't lash out at him. She swore back at him from behind Goyle's palm, but she went unheard. "I'm just—doing what I was told." He explained, as if he owed her an explanation. And just when she thought this situation couldn't get any worse, after he managed to outstretch her arm from where he stood behind her—his hand clasped around her wrist—she saw him pull out a knife.

She knew what he was doing, knew what he planned—because if Malfoy just wanted to hurt her, he would have used magic, not a knife. And he had essentially told her, hadn't he? Told her what he was doing, told her he was only doing what he was told. It went unsaid that it was what his Dark Lord had told him, and that his Dark Lord had asked for her.

She twisted her head away from Goyle's hand, finally. "No," She begged, because without her wand there was nothing else she could do, and when she saw the brief hesitation of Draco's hand, the moment of stillness as the knife pressed into her palm but didn't cut, not yet, she continued, "No, please, you don't know what you're doing—"

The knife slid over her hand and she choked on her words, watching the deep red seep from the cut and flow onto the diary at her feet like water, coat the paper like ink, before seeping into nothingness like magic. It was silent.

And then it was light.

When it faded, she was in that study again—small and filled with books and somewhere that, in any other circumstances, might be comforting. She knew she wasn't alone, knew he was there, but for the moment it almost felt like she was alone. She stared at the palm of her hand, unblemished and unharmed, and turned her eyes to the window that allowed light to fall in the room. White, synthetic, it didn't feel like sunlight, it was the same kind of light that swallowed her up when she came and went from this place. She wondered if she jumped out that window if she would be surrounded by nothing but that horrible light.

"Welcome back, Hermione Granger."

She wanted to scream, but she knew it would do her no good. So she calmly turned, and there he was; arms crossed, leaning against the wall on the far end of the room, so at ease. She wished she held the knife Malfoy had wielded in her own hands, maybe then he wouldn't look so at ease, so in control.

She hated the sound of her name from his lips.

"You asked for me?" She commented.

"Asked being the operative word." He fired back immediately, and she couldn't tell if it was because he knew she was say that or if he was just always prepared for some sort of verbal battle, always ready to argue or correct or—god forbid—give his monologue.

"So why?" She pressed, "I never took you as the sentimental type."

"Sentimental," He echoed, as if her assumption amused him. They both knew she didn't mean it, but her calm reference to the words that bound them together still caused his mouth to curl in that subtle, unsettling way. She hated it, and her fingers curled into her palm where there should be a wound. She hated him. She wished his reason for asking her back could truly be as simple as wanted to speak to his soulmate. "I must admit," He said quietly, after a brief moment of silence in which he watched the anger play out in the tension in her shoulders and her hands curled into fists at her side, "It was certainly a surprise."

"You weren't the one who found out they were bound to a book." She said.

His head tilted to the side as he regarded her, and in a tone that was far too self-indulgent for her to bear, he said, "But we both know I am not just a book."

"We both know you aren't much more, either." She snapped. It was the first time in this discussion that he appeared displeased, and she reveled in it. Let him be displeased, she thought, let him be angry. Let him drop this pseudo-pleasant guise.

"I did not ask that insufferable child to bring you to me to have an argument," He said evenly, and she didn't let it show that she liked his reference to Draco, because in all honestly she really didn't. Truly. "I want to have a conversation."

"I'm not interested in having a conversation with the devil." She spat. She wished she hadn't said it when it appeared that he liked it.

"You are not a fool," He commented lightly, "Don't act like one."

"You don't know anything about me," She snapped back.

He slowly pushed himself off the wall so that he stood up straight. She had forgotten how tall he was—or, she hadn't forgotten, but she had pushed it from her mind—and she wondered if it was possible for him to make himself seem bigger, here, in this unreal world. His arms fell from where they had been crossed across his chest and they clasped behind his back as he slowly approached her. "I know you are the brightest witch of your age," He commented, and the moniker sounded sour coming from his lips, "A mudblood," He continued, each observation bringing him closer to her, "Best friend of the boy who, apparently, killed me. As an infant." She didn't miss the displeased curl of his lip, but it was gone in an instant. When he reached her, standing less than a foot away and gazing down at her as if she was a particularly interesting ant, he added, "And my soulmate."

"Don't say that." She said without thinking. She swore she saw his eyes light up when she did, and she wouldn't be surprised if he delighted in every ounce of discomfort that she felt.

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours," He murmured, clearly in an effort to make her uncomfortable. But she did want to see it, wanted it to be undeniable what they were, because if she was damned then she at least wanted to _know_ she was damned, wanted to know there was no way out. So angrily, in quick, jerky movements, she lifted her arm and pulled her shirt up at her side, up her ribs, stopped just underneath her breast so he could see the words that lined her side. And it was worth it to see the brief pucker of his brow, the surprise and unease of seeing his handwriting seeped into her skin, the words he first spoke—wrote—to her.

It wasn't worth it when his hand moved and his fingers traced the words.

There was something unnerving in the way his hand felt. It was similar to the way it had felt when his nose grazed her cheek—shocking and disconcerting, it made her jump more than was justified—it was prickling. When his skin touched hers it felt like a burn, like every graze of his fingertip along her ribs was marking her again, warm and tingling and though the feeling wasn't violent she still felt like it was, in some way. Because it was him. Because it was his hand.

She jerked away. "Show me." She demanded, and when her shirt dropped to cover the words his eyes jumped back up to meet hers. His hand, for a single moment, hovered in the air where it had been touching her a moment before, and then he flexed his fingers and returned his hand behind his back. She waited.

"We could help each other," He told her, "You and I."

"Show me the—" She started to command, but he interrupted her, his voice much calmer than her.

"I will," He assured her, "We both have something the other wants."

She wanted to tell him to shut up and show her his mark, but his words distracted her. She watched him warily for a breath, because tentatively asking, "What do you want?"

"To be free." He answered.

"And what do I want?" She pressed.

He nearly smiled. "To be free of Voldemort."

She faltered. "You're Voldemort." She said.

"Not the Voldemort you know." He countered. "There are fifty years between the Voldemort you know and the one I am."

"The Voldemort I know is _dead_." She snapped.

"Now," He chided, "How can that be so if I'm here?"

She shouldn't have asked, she should have disregarded his words for exactly what they were, an attempt to intrigue her, to gain her help in freeing him from his diary. She didn't know why he didn't just use Malfoy to do it, kill him in the chamber instead of Ginny. She hadn't wanted him to, but she had expected him to, and this attempt at swaying her caught her off guard, and so she asked, "What do you mean?"

His lips twitched. She was starting to understand they did that—a subtle upturn at the side, brief, the barest amount of movement—when he liked a turn in the conversation. She didn't want to please him, didn't want this conversation to go any way he wanted, but she wanted to know. "You know what I am."

It wasn't a question. "A horcrux." She said.

"And what are horcruxes created for?" He goaded, but she didn't know. She knew what Viktor had told her, that you killed someone to make them, that they were extremely dark magic. But she hadn't thought to ask why someone would ever do it. She considered his words, considered the context of his question—if a horcrux would somehow ensure Voldemort was still out there alive, then—

"Immortality?" She guessed. He really did smile this time, a crooked sort of smirk that showed a flash of his teeth when he did it. She hated it, knowing she was the cause. She didn't ever want to please him, she wanted to anger him as much as he angered her.

"Did you only just figure that out?" He asked, sensing the hesitancy of her answer. She glared back at him.

"I could destroy you." She told him, "I could just destroy you and be done with it—"

"Perhaps when you figure out how," He agreed, taking a step toward her, so that he was once again invading her personal space. "And I'm sure you'll feel very proud of yourself, until Voldemort's inevitable return when you discover that I was not the only thing keeping him alive."

"Keeping you alive." She corrected, annoyed at the way in which he differentiated himself from _himself_. His eyebrow rose.

"You are focusing on the wrong part of that sentence," He commented dryly.

"How many?" She asked, "How many of—you—"

"If you free me," He told her, his voice low and sinuous, and she hadn't realized just how close he had stepped to her until that moment, "Then I will tell you."

He was lying. She didn't know about what, but she knew that he was. The moment she helped him she would be damning the entire wizarding world, but that didn't stop her from considering the possibility, for a moment. Hypothetically, what better way was there to defeat a dark lord than with another dark lord?

Hundreds of better ways, she lectured herself. Ways that don't include trading one dark wizard for another.

"Show me the mark." She said instead after a beat of silence.

For a beat, he didn't. And she wondered if when he had offered to show her he hadn't truly meant it, if he had only been baiting her to show him, if maybe he hadn't expected her to do it, if maybe he hadn't wanted to show her his. So she waited, and she really thought that if he refused she would rip the clothes covering his skin from his body if it meant she could see it, if it meant she could leave herself no doubt, if it meant she could kill that torturous 'what-if' that suggested it might all be a mistake.

But he showed her, in the end. He extended his arm between them, rolled up his sleeve and in deep black lettering she saw her words, her handwriting. The skin upon which it lay was marred, in some way, almost as if someone had taken a knife and attempts to peel the words off of his body years ago, and when it healed it had not healed smooth and unblemished. The words, for their uneven surface, remained just as fiercely dark and striking against his pale skin.

She wouldn't feel pity for him, even picturing him young and trying to peel the horrible words from his skin. She reminded herself of everything he was, of everything he had done, and she didn't care, he deserved it, he deserved _worse_ —

She didn't notice t first that she had reached for him in much the same way he had reached for her before, her fingers trailing over the words, but when she realized she didn't jerk away. She tuned in to the strange feeling that bloomed at her fingertips where her skin touched his, and she hated him.

She didn't have to look at him to know he was pleased, in some way, by her reaction, because his silence and his stillness said enough. She didn't have to meet his eyes to know that he thought he was winning, that he thought he was in control. She wanted to strip him of that control, of his arrogant overconfidence, she wasn't sure she had ever wanted to hurt someone so badly in her entire life. She felt angry and trapped and scared and she wanted more than anything to make him feel just as horrible as he made her feel.

She thought about his mark, the white, puckered skin, but to use that as fuel to anger him would surely backfire on her own bleeding heart. She thought of his plan, his attempt at swaying her to help him, of appealing to her hatred of him in he own time, hoping she hated the Voldemort she knew more than the Voldemort of this diary.

She thought of his ridiculous attempt to differentiate, because she knew they were one in the same. They weren't separate entities—they were one soul split into parts, one evil, putrid soul in two different places at once. And to think that he should feel so at ease with destroying the other half of his soul was—

And instantaneously, she realized what he wanted. Pulling her fingers away from his skin, she met his eyes, saw the hungry way in which he regarded her, and she understood his desperation. All this time she had more or less seen this horcrux as being created, being born, on that day so long ago. But he wasn't born, she realized. He was split.

She wondered how long he had planned to make this. She wondered how long he had fantasized about the moment after he made it, the knowledge that he wouldn't die, the power over the life he had taken. She wondered how long he had waited for that moment, to be free from death, and when it happens he finds himself trapped in a prison of his own making, the other half of his soul living the life he so desperately wanted while he remained here, an object, alone.

Something victorious coiled in her gut, and she thought she must be getting quite good at masking her expression that he couldn't see it right away.

"How does it feel?" She asked suddenly, "Or rather…how did it feel?"

There was the brief furrow of his brow, almost unnoticeable, and either because he knew she didn't mean his mark itself, or his scar, he clarified, "How did what feel?"

"When it was all done," She clarified. He watched her closely, and she felt the weight of his gaze as his arm fell to his side once more. Anger simmered in her chest, climbing up her throat and bursting past the wall of her teeth, "All that planning, everything—and when you finally do it, you find yourself on the wrong side of a coin flip."

"I'm not sure to what you're referring." He said calmly, evenly, and she got the feeling he was giving her a chance to back off, giving her a chance to choose another path of conversation. How like him, she thought, to act as if he could ever have control over her words, could ever intimidate her into silence. She narrowed her eyes.

"How did it feel," She continued viciously, "To wake up here? To know that after all that planning you wind up the half of yourself forced into this place, the other half lives your coveted immortal life while you rot away here in a prison of your own making—"

He moved quite quickly, then, his hand wrapping around her throat and pressing her against the wall behind her. His face showed very little—it always did—but there was something telling in the tightness of his eyes, in the muscle in his jaw that twitched as he regarded her. She had succeeded in making him angry, and the shock of the sudden contact made her instinctually wrap both hands around his arm, but she stopped herself before she pushed him away. She didn't have her wand, not here, but she wouldn't let him believe for even a moment that she felt afraid, that she feared she was at a disadvantage. He was bigger than her, physically stronger, and if she pushed him away it would only prove her fear and her weakness.

So instead she left her hands where they were on his arm, felt the strange almost-burning sensation at her palms and at her throat, and she didn't push him away, just glared up at him with all the confidence she could fake.

"You've trapped yourself here," She continued, because his hand on her throat was only a warning thus far, and she could still breathe and speak with ease. "The other you awoke in the girls bathroom over Myrtle's dead body and you woke up here, trapped, alone—"

"Your overconfidence is astounding, Hermione," He said, and he must've noticed before how uncomfortable she felt when he used her name, because the way he said it now was slow, indulgent, as if he was milking her discomfort for everything it was worth.

"Is it?" She challenged, "Am I not right?"

"Do you think angering me will give you the upper hand?" He asked quietly, "Do you think you can monopolize on my desperation to escape?" His free hand rose so that his long fingers could gently wrap around her wrist. The softness of the act was jarring, enough to draw her eyes away from his and watch the movement of his hand. She hated it, hated the way she could never quite guess what he was going to do, hated the way he seemed to revel in her discomfort. "You forget that desperation can make a man willing to do anything to get what he wants."

"Like what?" She spat.

"I have your blood now," He reminded her, and she remembered herself outside of this diary, her blood spilling onto the pages, "If you don't do as I ask," His fingers flexed against her throat, "Then I can make you."

For a moment, she believed him. For a moment, she felt herself swallowed up by the desolation of her position, the helplessness, the knowledge that she was well and truly powerless. But when that moment passed, when her heart started beating again, she realized that his words held no meaning, nothing more than a bluff.

"No, you can't" She murmured, watching his expression closely and feeling the familiar euphoria of being right when she saw his lips twitch, "You can keep me here, but that's all you can do."

"Do you believe that?" He challenged.

"It's true." She insisted, "Because if all you needed was blood, you would have never wasted your time charming Ginny, you would have ordered someone to spill her blood over the pages and be done with it—no," She felt herself almost smiling, watching the displeased expression settle over his face, "You need trust. You need more than blood—you can keep me here, but you can never control me, not if I don't trust you. Not if I don't let you."

"Mind yourself," He warned her calmly, his finger flexing against her throat again, less reactionary this time and more as if he intended to squeeze. He didn't. "I could not keep you long before because I only had a drop of blood that I had held onto as long as I could. The blood that spilled over these pages—I could keep you here for days."

"You couldn't." She challenged, "In theory, perhaps, but what would Malfoy do with my body? And what would a professor do when they find me unresponsive by your diary?"

His jaw twitched, but she noticed a moment too late that it was not in annoyance, but in mirth. His brow arched the way she noted it often did when he felt in control, and she clenched her jaw to stop herself from looking afraid. "You don't understand, do you?" He asked quietly, his hand slowly pulling away from her throat, his fingers ghosting down and across her collarbone, over her shoulder. She couldn't bring herself to move. "I could tie you up," He told her quietly, his voice soft and gentle and the movement of his fingers leaving goosebumps down her arm in their wake as he slowly dragged them down her arm, "Peel the skin off your arms, pluck the muscle off the bone and carve my name in the marrow," his hand suddenly held fast to her arm, as if he was trying to shock her. It worked, and she was pulling in a startled gasp of air through her teeth before she could stop herself. His eyes snapped up from her arm to meet her eyes, and she saw such a horrible kind of maniacal glee in his gaze.

His other hand rose to wrap around her throat this time, and no matter how much she pressed herself into the wall behind her she could not put any distance between them. His eyes flickered wildly over her face, down her throat, taking in the rapid, subtle movements of her chest. She closed her eyes for only a moment to focus on calming herself, and instantaneously she felt his nails dig into her arm and her throat, as if the thought of her ignoring him for even a moment was enough to immediately strip him of the childlike excitement that danced in his eyes when she was at his mercy. When she opened her eyes again, she had steeled herself well enough to glare at him and mean it, despite the fear.

"I could make you scream," He promised her, his voice still quiet and gentle and sounding nothing at all like it should when he is talking about torturing her. "Until you have no voice left. I could—" He pointedly tightened his grip on her throat so that she couldn't breathe, but then he stopped, changing his mind. He pulled that hand away, his index finger slowly drawing down the center of her neck and down her sternum, over the fabric of her shirt between her breasts. She felt light-headed, desperately trying to calm her breaths. "I could cut you open," He said, though his eyes were fixed on the path his finger took down the center of her abdomen before it stopped. "I could spend weeks, carving runes into your ribcage, and by the end of it," His hand moved, his whole palm pressing against her stomach instead of just his finger as he pressed her more firmly against the wall. His eyes were still fixed on his hand, as if transfixed. "You will wake up outside of this diary and it will have only been a moment," He met her eyes again, and he smiled a truly horrible smile, "And then we can start again."

She couldn't speak, her mind providing images of what he had described, her heart still leaping at the pressure of his hand on her stomach. She had to calm her breath before she tried to speak, and he watched her as she did. His eyes moving back and forth between hers. "I am in control here." He reminded her, gently and assuredly as if what he said was supposed to calm her, but they both knew it wasn't meant to do that at all.

"Yes, you are," She agreed after a moment, her voice shakier than she intended but she pushed on regardless, "But at some point you'll have to let me go." She met his eyes, watched the barely-there tilt of his head as he listened to her. His expression didn't change. "Keep me here for weeks, months—it doesn't matter, the first thing I'm doing when I get out of here is punching Malfoy in the face and _destroying_ you."

Her words did not have the effect she hoped. After a moment of no reaction other than the loss of his smile, a moment where she thought maybe he was simply refusing to show any emotions because he knew she was right, he narrowed his eyes. "No, you won't." He observed. She didn't reply, confused by his blunt assumption, so he continued without her input. "Because some part of you believes me." His lips twitched at the corner, not quite the horrifying smile from before but still equally as discomforting, "And you believe that, at some point, I may be your only choice."

She refused to admit he was right.

"You would be worse," She told him quietly, ignoring the almost proud upturn of his lips, "I would be trading one dark wizard for another. It wouldn't be worth it."

"We'll see." He promised, and the way he said it was too amicable, too calm, too promising. And he still watched her with those hungry eyes, like he truly believed she would be his key to escaping, like he believed he had her right where he wanted.

"How far you've fallen," She said lightly, trying to match his tone, "That your only chance at escaping this prison is help from a _mudblood_."

The way he looked at her then was amused, the way someone looks at a pet that does something endearing, as if he had expected the jab. "Desperation," He reminded her simply, "I have been waiting for someone of use to find this diary for decades. And who should find it but you?" He didn't meet her eyes, because he was focused on her side where he knew his words to be. "The very person I was most anxious to meet."

"I'll kill you." She promised him, all to aware of his palm against her abdomen, keeping her pinned to the wall, his other hand at her arm, and he was so close, too close, looming over her, and she hated that he could feel the calming breath she sucked in through her teeth no matter how hard she tried to keep it silent, "When you let me go, I'll destroy you."

He smiled, wide enough that it showed his teeth, wide enough that lines formed around his mouth. His hand at her arm raised to grip her jaw, to force her too meet his eyes because she had been focused on his mouth. She hated just how gleeful he looked, as if her promise to kill him had truly delighted him. "Oh, Hermione Granger," He murmured quietly, and she felt his breath against her cheek. "I believe you."

The light that swallowed her up, expanding from the window until she could see nothing but that blasted whiteness, took her by surprise. And when she blinked away the light to find herself under the stands again, trapped in Goyle's arms, her arm outstretched and her palm bleeding over that blasted diary, she realized with a certain amount of uneasiness that he had let her go.

She leaned forward just enough to give her more momentum in order to slam the back of her head into Goyle's nose. It caught him by surprise, his arms loosening around her waist enough for her to jerk away form him, turn, and punch Draco Malfoy has hard as she could in the nose.

When she reached into his pocket and retrieved her wand, and turned on Crabbe, who was departing from the entrance in order to advance on her with his wand raised. She cast a quick ' _expelliarmus_ ', followed by a particularly vicious ' _stupefy_.' When Goyle had finished nursing his nose, and made advancements she offered him the same treatment, catching Malfoy with an angry ' _stupefy_ ' just before he made the entrance. He hadn't been fighting so much as running but she was so angry at this point she didn't particularly care.

She wasn't even completely sure if she could blame him. She didn't know what happened in the time between Malfoy acquiring the diary and that moment, but she knew he had been given some kind of instructions to bring her. She remembered everything Ginny had gone through with that devil's book, and though it was likely that Malfoy had been ready to follow his Dark Lord's every command to begin with, she knew there was still a chance that what he had done was out of fear. Or coercion.

She turned her head to the diary on the ground, just as blank as it always was, lying open before her. She wondered why he had let her go, what game he was playing at, and why he was so confident he would win. She thought for a moment that he must want her to take the diary, and she had half a mind to leave it behind, but leaving it in Malfoy's hands was a mistake. The only place that diary would be safe from evil intentions would be in her own hands, so she swiped it up and shoved it into her bag before tearing out from under the stands and running towards the first aid tent.

She left Malfoy and his friends behind. The spell would wear off soon, anyway.

"Harry!" She called once she tore through the opening to the tent, spotting him and immediately throwing herself at him, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, "Absolutely brilliant, you're summoning charm was perfect—"

"I couldn't have done it without you," He told her lightly, his arms still around her when she pulled away.

"Yes, you could have," She told him, "Besides, the hard part was the flying, and that's all you—"

"Hermione," Ron interjected at Harry's side, "You're bleeding."

Shocked, she pulled quickly away from Harry and stared at her bloody hand. She had forgotten. "Oh," she said, "Uh—yeah, I cut my hand." She answered vaguely.

"I can call over the healer—"

"No!" She cut Harry off, grabbing a roll of gauze off a table near the hair Harry was sat upon, rolling it out and wrapping it around her hand quickly, "I'm alright, I'll get it healed later—it's just a cut."

"How did it happen?" Ron asked, a bit skeptically.

"I just fell," She answered, "The crowds tripped me up,"

"Are you..alright?" Harry asked tentatively. Hermione turned her eyes up from wrapping her hand to stare at him in confusion.

"I'm—I'm fine," She said, "It's just a cut."

"No, I meant—lately you've just seemed a bit out of sorts." Hermione wasn't sure how to answer, which Harry inevitably took for confusion, so he elaborated, "You just seem…stressed."

"I'm worried." Hermione answered honestly, but then followed it up with a lie, "Worried about you and this tournament—that's all. I'll be alright when it's over."

He nodded, and as she sat beside him his hand rested at her back, rubbing calm, comforting circles between her shoulder blades. Ron sat on Harry's other side, and he reached across to gently lift her wounded hand—freshly wrapped though the blood already stained the layer of white—and examined it.

"Are you sure you're alright?" He asked, "That seems like a pretty deep cut to get from falling—"

She jerked her hand away, "I'm fine, Ronald." She said, not meanly, but firmly enough that he would drop the subject. He did, though she could tell by the unhappy downturn of his lips that he didn't want to. More for her sake than his, she added, "I'm fine."

She could feel the weight of that diary in her bag, and she remembered his words before she left. _Hermione Granger,_ he said, her name poisoned the moment it fell from his lips, _I believe you._

If he believed her, then why had he let her go?

Harry's hand continued to draw soothing circles on her back, but she couldn't shake the disconcerting cold feeling that had settled in her chest, and as lost in her thoughts as she was, for a moment it didn't even feel like Harry's hand. It felt like _his_ , bare skin on bare skin, that lovely, horrible, burning feeling spread across her back. _Hermione Granger,_ he said in her ear, _I may be your only choice_.

"'Mione?" Ron called, watching the expression on her face.

"I'm fine," She lied.

And she would be, she knew. When Tom Riddle was dead.

—

 **HELLO**

 **first of all I want to say that my gOOD PAL PRIMRUE MADE AN AMAZING VIDEO INSPIRED BY THIS STORY IM FUCKING DYING EVERYONE SHOULD GO WATCH IT EVERYONNEEE**

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 **anyway I was going to wait to finish this chapter until I had finished School days and Lurking simply BECAUSE i knew this might be a bit long, but….afTER I SAW THAT VIDEO I COULDNT HELP MYSELF I WAS LIK EOK I NEED 2 WRITE MORE FOR THIS NOW as i watched that video on repeat**

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	3. Chapter 3

Over the course of the next few months, Hermione found herself in constant fear of losing her mind.

She had locked the diary away in her trunk once more with no desire to pull it back out until she knew how to destroy it. She knew what it was, at the very least, and she had hoped that would aid her in her search for how to be rid of it, but finding information on horcruxes was nearly impossible in the Hogwarts library. It was no surprise, as it was inarguably dark, but even when she had just barely managed to charm a pass to the restricted section from Professor Binns she still could find nothing of any interest.

Sometimes she thought she could hear him, and though she knew it was just in her head it still unnerved her. She heard things he had already said, echoing in her mind over and over until she wanted to scream, his voice whispering whenever she thought she was close to finding out how to kill him, _I may be your only choice_.

He was lying, of course. She knew this. Ginny had spoken, on the rare occasions that she did speak of the diary, of his ability to make her believe things that weren't true to ensure she didn't leave him—making her believe he was her only friend, for one—so she knew this was the same tactic, just barely tweaked in order to suit a different target. Still, the words stuck in her mind, and though they didn't slow her efforts they still filled her with an odd sort of anxiety that questioned if she was making the right choice.

But, she reminded herself, even if Voldemort did survive somehow, somewhere, because of this thing in her trunk. Even if he was alive, destroying it would not ensure his return. If anything, it would make it so that he was finally able to die.

Viktor visited her more in the library, which was interesting, because Hermione had been certain her panicked exit would have made him hesitant to ever approach her again. But approach her he did, at first waiting for her to find a place in the library and then tentatively asking to sit with her, then later on he would sit at her spot and wait for her to arrive.

It was odd.

She didn't particularly dislike it. She rather liked it, in fact, and he never pressed or judged when she asked a question that was rather dark. He only answered, or admitted his ignorance if he did not have an answer to offer to her. It was a lovely distraction, really, because while he did not judge her for her questions he did seem altogether rather uninterested by them, instead rather interested in not speaking at all.

He liked to sit with her. He liked to catch her eye when they were in public and quietly watch her while she worked or spoke with friends. He liked to listen to her speak, whether it was about her research or her classes or anything, and he was rather good at finding places where they could be alone, away from prying eyes, places where she could forget about the evil diary in her bedroom and the lies she told to her friends, away from Harry's involvement in this horrible tournament and her complete inability to do anything to help.

She kissed him first. They had been talking about fighting, for some reason, and she had mentioned punching Malfoy only because Viktor seemed to be of the opinion that Hermione had absolutely no knowledge on how to physically defend herself. He hadn't been precisely condescending when he said it, but there was a certain air of disbelief when he stood—they were hidden away on the grounds of Hogwarts at a spot by the lake, surrounded by the branches of a weeping willow—and offered for her to hit him.

She did. She punched him as hard as she could in the cheek and he had reared back and stared at her for a solid thirteen seconds—she counted—before he laughed, a joyous, defeated sort of sound, and he looked at her like he was amazed, and she said, "I could hit you harder" And he told her, "Oh, I believe you."

The words struck her, made her feel cold and frightened and she remembered a very different voice in very different circumstances say those same words to her, and she was so desperate for the warmth and forgetfulness of Viktor's presence to return that she cupped his face in her hands and just kissed him, just like that, kissed him to stop his laughter and stop the voice in her mind that echoed over and over and over—

He kissed her back. His hands found her waist and stayed there, large and heavy and still, and his nose bumped against hers and he used too much teeth at first and she thought the kiss was altogether rather ordinary, but he was warm, and if she kissed him she could almost get rid of that voice in her head that murmured her name, she could almost get rid of the image of the way his lips moved when he said it—

When they pulled away he asked her to the Yule Ball, breathless and hurried and sounding as if he had not planned at all to ask her in that moment but couldn't stop himself. She said yes.

They never talked about their words. She waited for the conversation to come, waited for him to say it, to bring it up, to blurt it out, "We don't have each other's words. What are we doing? Do you want to stop?" But it never came. But she could swear she felt her words burn every time she kissed him, like someone was branding her, like the world was reminding her that Viktor wasn't hers and she wasn't his, like Tom Riddle was there in the mark on her ribcage to stake his claim.

She always felt him. She heard his voice, felt his fingers brush against her mark when she slept, she dreamed of him following through on the threats he had made in the diary, sometimes his voice was so clear in her head she could almost feel his breath at her ear as he said it, like he was there, like she was going insane.

Draco Malfoy had not approached her since the incident, neither did his cronies. But he still caught her eye sometimes, and she would watch his upper lip curl in disdain when he did. She found it odd that what had happened between them had not exacerbated what already dwelled between them. He always hated her, always went out of his way to torment her nearly as much as he went out of his way to torment Harry, but somehow that moment with the diary had him keeping his distance. She wondered why, wondered what Tom Riddle had said to him, wondered if Draco was as evil as he sometimes seemed or wondered if he was simply afraid, afraid like she was, afraid of the man in the diary and the horrible things he promised.

She wondered, watching Draco Malfoy stand with Pansy Parkinson at the corner of the room at the Yule Ball as Viktor Krum twirled her around the dance floor to distract her from the angry and betrayed glowers of Ronald Weasley, if maybe he had always just been afraid.

The Yule Ball was the beginning of a downward spiral that never seemed to end.

—

She had fun, at first. Viktor was happy and his happiness was, as always, infectious. He was a better dancer than she had anticipated, better than her, in fact, and she could't help but allow a small part of her to please as well with the way everyone watched her in shock. It was nice to feel beautiful every once and a while, though she couldn't imagine the annoyance of having to put this much effort into her appearance everyday, and it was with that thought that she had to begrudgingly respect girls like Lavender Brown or Pansy Parkinson.

The room was light and the music was loud and Viktor selfishly and unapologetically kept her to himself on the dance floor, and she found herself laughing and having fun and actually forgetting about the man that haunted her mind long enough to genuinely enjoy Viktor's presence without thinking, without forcing it.

Then Ron ruined it.

"Krum?" He demanded, in the short amount of time that Viktor had separated from her in order to get her a drink from the refreshments table—she had warned him ahead of time that it was very possible it could be spiked, considering the twins' presence at the dance, but he saw it fit to risk it—Ron had seized her by the arm and pulled her to the side of the room, his face a darker red than his hair. " _Krum_?"

"Do you have something to say?" She snapped, jerking her arm away, "Or are you just going to squawk his name again—"

" _Krum_ , Hermione? What the _hell_?" Hermione's jaw clenched, and she readied herself to offer a snappish response, but Ron continued before she could, "Is that where you'e been all this time? Avoiding us for Krum?"

"Avoiding you?" She echoed, "What makes you think I've been—"

"Because you are!" He exploded, "You leave dinner early every night to go Merlin-knows-where—"

"The _library_ —" She cut in angrily, though that was only sometimes true.

"Harry and I barely see you anymore and then you show up with the enemy—"

"Enemy?" She laughed, a bitter, angry sound, "Wasn't it you who wanted to ask for his autograph?"

"That was before he got put against Harry in the tournament!" Ron snapped, "The tournament you've been doing nothing to help with, by the way—"

"I helped!" She argued, "You were the one who refused to even speak to Harry—"

"That was before!" His hands raised, his fingers curled and tensed and looking as if he was ready to either claw his own eyes out or tear his own hair out, "But I'm with him now—which is just as good because you bloody disappeared!"

She hadn't disappeared, she wanted to say, she was right _here_! If they needed her all they had to do was ask, she wasn't avoiding them, but then she thought of all the time she had spent on her own thinking about Tom Riddle or all the time she spent with Viktor Krum and she wondered if maybe she _had_ disappeared. If while she was losing her mind she was also losing her friends. She thought he might have a point, because she couldn't remember the last time she really sat with Harry and Ron for longer than a moment, but her anger remained, fierce and steady in her throat, and she waved a finger in Ron's face when she said furiously, "You have no clue, Ronald Weasley," And there must've been something about her tone that effected him, because he looked genuinely shocked, "You have no idea what I've been through!"

"No I bloody don't," He spat, recovering from his shock, "Because you're never around, and then you show up to the ball with Viktor bloody Krum!" She made to leave, because she could see the start of a circular conversation starting and she was so sick and tired of Ron looking at her like she had betrayed him when she hadn't. He caught her arm and she jerked away, but he blocked her path so she couldn't walk away. Neither realized that they were still in the hall, that they were still surrounded by people, that they were making a scene. "Does he have your words?" He demanded, and she wasn't surprised when he asked, he had always been fixated on his own mark and by some extension, everyone else's as well. "That's the only bloody reason I can think for you to bring him of all people—"

"If you were really so worried about who I go to the ball with, you could have asked me yourself!" Hermione snapped, her voice had risen to a volume and tone she didn't often use, but she was so angry, so fed up, she had one night to forget about everything that was going wrong and Ronald Weasley ruins it, ruins everything. "But no, you won't, because you've spent all your time worrying about whether you would meet the girl who bears your mark! Don't _pretend_ you've been worrying all about Harry when I know all you care about are the words on your chest!"

She shoved him in the chest to drive her point home and Ron stared at her with wide blue eyes, looking both angry and upset, but Hermione was too angry to stop herself from continuing even if he had looked apologetic, which he didn't. "Who cares about our words?" She snapped, and tears sprang to her eyes before she could register she was even that upset, "They're horrible, ugly stains on our skin that try and tell us who to love—they're useless and pointless fairytales, they aren't _real_!" Ron stared at her as if she had slapped him across the face. She lifted her hands to wipe away the tears that were collecting at the corners of her eyes, but they reappeared as soon as she wiped them away.

"Oh just—" She snapped, her throat closing up, she felt so frustrated, so angry, so frightened and sad and this night was supposed to be fun, it was supposed to be perfect, she was supposed to have one moment where she didn't feel haunted by that stupid fucking book and here her supposed best friend comes and just pulls her back into everything. She could hear _his_ voice, could feel his fingers stretch across her side where her mark was, could feel him as if he was right there in front of her, hear him, _I'll show you mine if you show me_ —

"Just shut _up_!" She snapped, "Just leave me _alone_!"

She left Ron there, looking just as angry and betrayed as he had before the conversation started. She left Viktor wherever he was in the hall, she left the music and the carefree students and the ease of the evening, she felt herself dissolving into tears and she couldn't stop herself, couldn't stop the angry sobs that tore out of her throat. She just needed to get away, to shut herself away somewhere where she could just cry and panic and _scream_.

But of course her night wasn't over yet.

In her state, she hadn't heard anyone approach her until she felt their hands on her arms, until they pushed her into a nearby alcove, until she was pressed against the wall. At first she was certain it was Ron, running after her to yell at her some more as if he hadn't already said enough, but she found to her intense dismay that her assailant had a bright head of blonde hair, not red, and she felt a vicious, dark sort of anger stretch across her chest like a rubber band and snap—

She raised her knee as hard as she could into his crotch, pushed him away and scrambled to retrieve her wand and raised it against him. He had done the same, hunched over slightly in pain as he held his wand out in front of him. "I swear to God, you come any closer and I'll make you wish you were never born, Draco Malfoy,"

He hesitated, and his face twisted in disgust when he asked, "Are you _crying_?"

Feeling slightly hysterical, she snapped "What the _hell_ do you want?"

"Where is it?" He demanded, "I know you took it, so where is it?"

He didn't need to clarify what he was asking for, they both knew what he was after before he even spoke. "You think I just carry it with me?" She spat, "You think I want that monster to be with me wherever I go?"

"Watch your tongue, mudblood," He spat back just as viciously, "I don't know what the hell he wanted so badly with you—" Hermione's fingers curled tighter around her wand at his words, "—But I know he wouldn't have wanted to be held prisoner by a filthy—"

"Expelliarmus!" She casted suddenly, and as soon as his wand was thrown from his hand she gripped him by the collar and pulled him toward her, pressing him against the wall he had briefly pinned her against, her wand at his throat. His countenance, as it often did, immediately changed when it became apparent that she had the upper hand. His hands flew up as a sign of surrender and he tilted his chin up, shying away from her wand.

"What does that mean?" She demanded, pressing her wand rather cruelly into his throat, "What did he ask of you?"

"Just you!" He whimpered, still somehow maintaining that sense of superiority even when he was at the mercy of her wand, "I tried to tell him you were nothing but a filthy mudblood, but—"

"Watch what you say," She seethed, tired of his insults, "Or I might lose my temper." She pressed the wand underneath his chin and he tilted his head further back to try and escape it.

"You were never supposed to get that diary." He spat, "It was supposed to go to bloody _Potter_ , but then you wind up with it—"

"Stop." She interrupted, the meaning of his words sinking in all too quickly—he had brought the diary to Ginny. He had meant to get it to Harry, for some reason, but it had wound up in Ginny's care—it was his fault. He brought this horrid thing into her life, he was the reason Ginny had been terrorized and he was the reason she was terrorized now, this was all his fault, all of this was Malfoy's bloody fault. She felt like she could scarcely see past her anger, her vision stained with red, "This is all your fault—" She started viciously, starting to wave her wand before she even truly knew what spell she wanted to cast.

"I was just doing as I was told!" He cried out, squeezing his eyes shut.

"You think that absolves you of the blame?" She snapped, her fist tightening on his collar, "You think—"

She stopped, her anger fading away in an instant. She had something of a realization, an idea, a plan. She watched the way his features scrunched up, preparing for pain, looking so terrified. He had only been doing what he was told, he said. She wondered if he always did as he was told.

"He asked for me." She said after a moment, her voice strangely blank. He opened one eye to peer at her, looking as if he was not at all convinced she wasn't going to physically maim him. "So then what makes me you think he wants you to have the diary? He asked you to bring him to me."

"Why would he want—"

"Shut up." She interrupted, sensing another pointless insult coming. "He entrusted the diary to you and you failed. You really think he believes you deserve a second chance?" Malfoy looked terrified, which was oddly satisfying, "The moment he has the chance, you'll face the consequences of your failure." She hesitated, reading his expression before she added, "And so will your family." He jolted, as if he hadn't truly expected her to mention them. "But you can save them," She promised him, "If you help me."

He hesitated, and after a moment he very quietly said, "That's exactly what he said."

Hermione wasn't sure how to respond at first, uncomfortable with the knowledge that she had done anything like that monster, but she collected herself quickly. It didn't matter if they had the same approach—it only mattered if it worked.

"So who will you trust?" She asked, "The man trapped in a book? Or the girl who wields the book?"

He didn't answer.

"All I need," She told him quietly, "Is when you go home, to look through your family library—I know you have one—find any mention of the word horcrux and bring those books to me."

"And what will you do with them?" He asked, "Why do you need to know about horcruxes?"

"I'm going to kill him." She answered steadily, and Malfoy jerked, his hands—which had previously dropped to his sides—rose to grip her wrists to try and get away but she pressed her wand into his throat once more in warning. "Don't move." She snapped.

"You're out of your bloody mind—"

"You don't have to help me kill him," She told him, "You just need to bring those books to me, that's it." His hands still gripped her wrists, but he didn't move her arm away lest she feel prompted to cast a spell. He looked unconvinced, so she continued, "He trusts me," She said. It was a lie, but she said it anyway. "Why else do you think he asked you to bring me to him instead of leaving the diary in your hands?" She unfurled her fist from his collar and he in turn, lowered his own hands. Her wand remained pressed against his neck. "So if I made him think you were disloyal, he would trust my judgement."

"You wouldn't do that," He told her, his sneer back in place now that she didn't seem on the edge of hexing him. "You're too Gryffindor."

"Why would I ever stand up for you when you have done nothing but terrorize me my entire life?" She spat, and his expression fell back to that terrified grimace. "If you do this for me," She told him, "Then I'll owe you."

He nodded, quickly and solemnly, as if he felt he truly had no choice. Hermione was surprised by his agreement, so it took her a moment to move away and lower her wand from his neck. "You'll do it?" She clarified.

"Yes, I'll bloody do it." He said, "I'll get your bloody books, just put the wand away!"

She lowered it, watched him for a moment where he was pressed against the wall. He believed her, she realized. He believed that Tom Riddle trusted her enough for her to have sway over whether or not Malfoy would be punished or not. He believed his choice to be either help her kill the monster or be killed by the monster himself. She wondered what Tom Riddle had said to make this situation even a little bit believable. She wondered—

Her blood turned to ice. Did he know about the mark?

"What else did he say to you?" She demanded, her voice finally calm. "He asked you for me, did he tell you why?"

Malfoy shook his head, "He told me he needed your blood. When I told him it was filthy—" She gritted her teeth, "He told me—he said not to question his judgement."

The way he said it—the way his tone suddenly changed and he rushed to the end of his sentence—told Hermione he had said something much worse than to simply not question his judgement. But the fear that flashed across Malfoy's face led her to believe that whatever Voldemort had said, it had nothing to do with her.

"Alright," She finally said, slowly lowering her wand and watching the way his shoulders sagged with relief. "Alright then. Bring me the books." He nodded, and she found herself at a loss of how to end this. She had never threatened anyone like this before. So after a moment, she said unsurely, "Thank you."

Malfoy looked just as confused as she did, and he warily responded, "You're…welcome."

"Goodbye." She said, meaning it as a dismissal but it sounded much more like a pleasant farewell. Malfoy nodded, carefully moved to the side and picked up his wand. Hermione watched as he did, ready for him to turn on her again, but he didn't. Instead he sped-walked down the corridor and away from her, back toward the hall where the dance was being held.

She remained there for a long time, her wand still drawn, slowly blinking away the anger. She felt, momentarily, very unlike herself. She wondered at the way she had so easily threatened and manipulated Malfoy into doing what she wanted, how she had held herself back from violence only because she thought the only way to get what she wanted was to let him go unharmed. She had been so phenomenally angry with him, angry with the situation, angry with the book who haunted her everywhere she turned, and she suddenly had the single, terrifying thought that the very man she sought to destroy would likely be very proud of the way she had just acted.

How is it, she thought, that she felt like she knew him, knew what he would think, knew that he would approve of her actions when she hardly knew him past a few uncomfortable moments in his presence that he largely spent threatening her. She remembered him so vividly, the tone of his voice, the feel of his fingers gliding across his ribs to feel her mark, she remembered each and every word he said in perfect, vivid detail, she couldn't get him out of her head, he was always there, taunting her, mocking her. She could hardly go a single moment without remembering him. She couldn't even kiss Viktor without his hand spanning her ribcage and then she would suddenly feel like _he_ was there, pinning her against the wall and spewing vile threats—

"Hermione?" She heard a voice call, and she jerks her wand up to face the source. At first she thought it was him—why wouldn't it be? She couldn't sleep or wake or speak to anyone without him popping up in her mind, why not pop up in reality, too?—but it was only Harry, standing at one end of the corridor watching her warily. "Hey," He said reproachfully, "What's…what's happened?"

She lowered her wand, and she truly thought she was through with crying until that moment. Her distraction with Malfoy had been exactly that, a distraction, but the sick and horrible feeling in her gut returned tenfold now that it was over. She was so jealous of people like Ron, people like Harry, people who could look upon their mark without disdain and without fear. She could hardly focus on what she _should_ be focusing on—helping Harry with the tournament, at the very least—because all she could think about was the person she was bound to trapped in a book in her trunk in her room. Evil incarnate, his handwriting carved into her side, and she didn't even know what that meant, she didn't even know how deep these bonds went, what if it really was _him_ in her mind, what if she wasn't going crazy, what if he was truly _there_ —

"Oh, Harry," She breathed, tears welling up in her eyes again. She didn't know what else to say. She couldn't tell him, not when he had the tournament to deal with. She couldn't tell Ron because he would tell Harry straightaway. She couldn't tell Ginny, she couldn't tell Viktor, she wanted more than anything to tell a professor but she feared her immediate expulsion or even stint in prison—she was harboring the dark lord in her bedroom for god's sake—She could do nothing but lean against the wall and slide down, bury her face in her hands and just cry without saying anything.

Harry sat beside her, he wound his hand around her shoulders and she let him pull her into his chest. "Ron said you two fought."

"Ron is an insensitive, paranoid bastard." Hermione spat. She felt simultaneously annoyed and somewhat mollified by the way she felt Harry's shoulder shake with laughter.

"Yes, he is that." Harry agreed, "I'd wager he's pretty sorry for it, though."

She didn't answer.

"What's gotten into you?" Harry asked, not unkindly, but with a genuine curiosity and concern that weighed on her shoulders just as heavy as his arm. He wasn't talking about only this moment, she knew. He was talking about the past few weeks, the difference in the way she was acting.

"It's nothing." She said quietly. "Or it's…a lot of things, I just—" She sat up straighter so she could meet Harry's eyes, "Do you ever feel like…you think about someone so much that it's almost like they're—they're in your _head_." She wasn't sure what to make of the way his brows furrowed in concern, and his eyes for a moment drifted down and away from hers, staring unseeing into the space between them. "Like you're losing your mind?"

"I—" He started, then stopped, then started again, "I—Who are we talking about?"

Hermione sighed. "No one." She said, "Never mind."

"Well I just—" Harry continued, "I didn't realize you and Viktor were that close—"

"We're not." She said firmly. "It's not Viktor, and…we're not."

"Oh." Harry said, nodding, "Is it…is it Ron?"

"Ugh, _no_." Hermione screwed up her face.

"Oi," Harry warned her goodheartedly, smiling despite his tone.

"Sorry," Hermione rolled her eyes, though she really wasn't, "I love Ron, but if I was his soul mate I really would lose my mind."

Harry laughed at that. "Yeah, me too." He admitted with a shrug. "God help whoever he gets."

"They'll have to be as bad as him." Hermione said. Harry laughed again, and she felt herself finally calming down since the incident with Ron. The anger and sadness in her chest was finally unfurling, falling away. How long had it been since she had sat with Harry or Ron and just relaxed, instead of desperately trying to forget by spending all of her time with Viktor? She liked Viktor, surely, but time with him was nothing like time with her friends.

And she had left Harry to deal with the next task alone.

"How are you coping?" She finally asked him, wrapping her arms around her knees as they sat and watching him closely, "With the task?"

"Ah, well…" He stalled, "Not—not well. Cedric gave me a tip but—"

"Well what did he say?" Hermione demanded.

"Uh—to put it in water—"

"So did you?"

"No," He answered a bit sheepishly. Hermione hit him on the shoulder.

"Why not?" She demanded.

"Well, I don't know," She hit him on the shoulder again, "There's been—a lot happening lately—"

"Like what?" She snapped, "What could possibly be more important than—" He gave her a slightly odd look then, and his meaning was explicitly clear. She had no leg to stand on, lecturing him about being distracted when she had been distracted herself. _I have a reason,_ she wanted to shout, _I have the dark lord in my bedroom_. But instead she backed off, nodded, and said, "Alright, well, you need to do it as soon as possible."

"Yes, I know." He agreed a bit irritably.

"I guess you should get back to the dance," She told him, "I see you and Ron came with Padma and Parvati?"

"Yeah, well." Harry shrugged, looking extremely important, "Needed a date, didn't I?"

"Thats a horrible thing to say." She admonished him, feeling sorry for the twins if this was the attitude Harry and Ron had while accompanying them.

"Well, we can't all take Viktor Krum, now can we?"

"Did _you_ want to take Viktor?" She teased.

"No." Harry rolled his eyes, but there was something in the way he refused to elaborate that told her she wasn't entirely wrong. There was someone he wanted to take, and Hermione wished he felt comfortable enough to tell her. Had she really been so distant that he couldn't even tel her who he fancied?

Then again, he had always been a bit secretive about that sort of thing, his mark that he kept hidden and secret only the tip of the iceberg. "Who did you want to take?" She asked.

"Doesn't matter." He shrugged, "But you're right, I should get back. You coming?"

"No." She shook her head, "I can't go back in there after the scene Ron and I caused." Harry opened his mouth as if ready to disagree, so she hurried on, pulling herself to her feet before he did. "Viktor will understand." She said firmly, leaving no room for argument.

Harry nodded. "Don't make yourself scarce, alright?" He said, his hand clasping her arm. She smiled and nodded.

"I'll see you tomorrow." She promised him.

If this moment, fueled by her deal with Malfoy and Harry's concern and care, felt like a moment of victory she would soon find it was nothing of the sort.

—

She didn't think of her dreams at length when she was awake, but it was not for lack of remembering them. She remembered every moment, every horrible thing that happened in them. She supposed it didn't help that the object of her fears was at the foot of her bed in her trunk, reeking of dark magic, but it wasn't as if she had anywhere else she could hide it. So she suffered through the dreams, the nightmares, and made a concerted effort to forget them during the day—or at the very least not think of them.

Sometimes he did what he threatened to do in the diary, he sliced her open, dug his fingers into her chest and ripped her apart. Once he plucked and pulled his way to her ribcage and carved his words on her bones, so that she would have to burn herself to ash in order to erase his claim on her. Sometimes he killed her friends, most often Harry, sometimes he made her kill them instead. Sometimes he did nothing more than wrap his fingers around her throat and speak to her, his other hadn't on her mark, he repeated the words he had already spoken to her, the things she shouldn't believe but she still found herself dwelling on, the promises he made to help her if she helped him.

Those were the worst of all, because she couldn't wake and shake them off and blame it on her overreactive imagination. In those dreams she always nearly said yes, just to stop this horrible feeling in her gut that hadn't disappeared since she found him, just to end this paranoia that at any moment the darkest wizard of all time would return and she would have don't nothing to stop it. Just to get his hands off of her so she didn't have to think about them when Viktor was holding her.

This night was different.

Emotionally and physically exhausted, Hermione climbed the moving staircases to Gryffindor tower and returned to her room. She wondered more than once if she should turn back and tell Viktor, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. She would explain it to him later, she decided, and she dragged herself to her room and threw herself on her bed without even changing out of her dress robes.

She planned to change. She just wanted a moment. She wanted a moment of quiet, to assure herself that Malfoy would do as he was asked, that she would be rid of this horrible thing soon. She could feel it where it was hidden, always aware of its presence. She wondered if horcruxes could do that, reach out to you, wrap its magic around you and make you feel suffocated and angry and scared. She wondered how long she would have to live with nightmares of him—the man she was supposedly bound to, the man who would sooner skin her alive than kiss her or hold her or love her, the man she would sooner bury alive than love _him_ —how long would she be keeping secrets before it was all finally over?

Is this what Ginny felt every day, she wondered? When she was eleven?

She fell asleep wondering that, wondering about all that he did to her, wondering about all the things Ginny never said, and wondering what it might be like to trace her fingers over her mark without feeling dirty again.

She dreamed of him again.

Like all dreams, it was extraordinarily difficult to discern when you were in one. So when she sat in that now familiar study, with the false white-light shining in through the window, to her it was real. He was standing, and unusually he was far away. The study seemed to stretch much further than she remembered, and she sat in his arm chair, dressed in the same clothes she wore during the first task, when Malfoy had stolen her away and brought her to the devil. He wore muggle clothes, too, a button down shirt and slacks, and his sleeves were rolled up and his hands clasped behind his back so she could see the edges of his mark, her handwriting on his skin.

"I tried to carve it off when I was a child," He told her evenly, as if he knew she was looking, as if he displayed it on purpose. "Before I knew what it meant."

"I hope it hurt." She told him. She regretted the words when he turned his head to face her and she saw the beginnings of a smile.

"You have a particular kind of viciousness in you." He told her, his dark eyes meeting hers as he turned to fully face her. She felt pinned to the chair, unable to move or turn away no matter how much she loathed the sight of him.

"It's not vicious to wish pain upon a monster." She told him.

"No," He agreed, "It isn't." He walked toward her, and the closer he came the more the rooms seemed to close in on her, suffocate her, until his hands were on each armrest and he loomed over her and there seemed to be no room left, like he controlled the environment so completely that he could imprison her in his arms, keep her from running away. She met his eyes and forced away every ounce of discomfort in her chest, refused to show him she was afraid. "To wish pain upon a boy, that might be vicious."

She didn't know what he meant.

"Poor Draco Malfoy," He murmured, and her blood went cold. "The things you would do to him if left to your own anger."

"I don't know what you—"

"You can't hide from me, Hermione Granger," He told her, "You can hide from your friends, but you can't hide from me." She pressed herself into the chair away from him but he leaned further, his features alight with absolute glee at the discomfort he could see on her face. "You wanted to hurt him nearly as badly as you want to hurt me."

She kicked him, lashed out and kicked him as hard as she could in the leg. It worked in forcing him away from her, and she stood as quickly as she could to try and put distance between them. "You don't know anything," She spat, "You weren't there—you don't know what happened—get out of my head!"

He moved too quickly, he caught her wrists behind her back, pressed her front against the wall of books. She was forced to turn her face toward him, and he was so close she could feel every inch of him, she could feel the strange burning sensation that always accompanied his touch. His lips were by her ear when he spoke, sounding every bit the monster she knew he was when his voice came out scarcely more than a hiss. "Wasn't I?" He asked her as her heart pounded so forcefully it made her chest hurt, "You forget, Hermione," She hated the way he said her name, but more than that she hated the way one of his hands moved to circle her waist so that his fingers pressed into the place his words were, "I'm always with you."

"You're always in a _book_ —" She rebutted fiercely.

"Why would I let you leave?" He challenged her, "Why would I allow you to leave me in that trunk of yours," She jerked away, uncomfortable with how much he knew, but he held her still. He wasn't in her head, she told herself, that was impossible, he wasn't— "Why would I let you go," He asked her again, and he pressed his hand more firmly against her mark and curled his fingers, his nails digging into her skin. "When you're _mine_?"

"Get off of me—" She demanded, but he didn't, he turned her around so that her back was pressed against the bookshelf and she didn't understand why she couldn't move, why her body felt so heavy and useless. He was so close, far, far too close, his hands both rested on her ribcage and stayed there, heavy and still, and she didn't understand what was happening. He hadn't hurt her yet, not really, he was just trying to scare her, but somehow this was worse, this closeness and his hands on her, it seemed far, far worse than any amount of torture he could unleash upon her.

"I'm not yours," She seethed, "Not anymore than you are mine."

"Don't you feel the way it calls to you?" He asked as if she had never spoke, "Don't you feel the way you've changed?" She finally managed to lift her hands despite the heaviness of her arms, to press them against his chest and push, but he went nowhere. "You're already keeping secrets from your friends, making deals with Malfoys." She shook her head, still trying to push him away, "Before long I think you'll find that you are just like me—"

"Let me out." She demanded breathlessly, and then much more severely, "Let me out of here right now,"

"Let you out?" He mocked, and no matter how she shoved at him he wouldn't budge. His hand that rested over her mark moved, but only to slide under the fabric of her shirt so she could feel him skin-to-skin. She didn't expect it to feel so violating, but it did, his fingers gliding up her side until they found his words. She felt a jolt when he touched her, like electricity jumping from his fingertips to her skin. "Where will you go?" He asked, "Where will you go that I won't follow?"

She didn't know the answer to that, she didn't know where she could go that she wouldn't hear his voice in her head. She didn't know how to be free of him, how to get away and stop thinking about him every moment, stop hearing his voice and feeling him near her. Her mind was screaming, split in halves, one part of her saying how ludicrous it was to ever believe he had gotten in her head and the other part of her screeching that of _course_ he was there, of _course_ he was, she would _never get away._

She felt that dark anger build in her chest, that feeling was becoming rapidly familiar, and she just wanted his hands off of her, she wanted him to get away from her, she wanted him to stop trying to scare her, to leave her alone, she wanted him to die, she—

"We're soulmates, Hermione," He reminded her, and she could feel his breath on her ear, "Surely you know that isn't decided by _chance_?" When she finally managed to push him away she thought he had probably let her. As he stumbled back, he looked far too pleased, far too delighted in the face of her anger.

She picked up the lit, single candelabra on the desk and she drove it into his throat.

She jerked awake, and it took her a few moments for her mind to come back to her and her heart to slow for her to realize it was a dream. It was just a dream, again, nothing but a dream, and she wished more than anything she could _recognize_ it for a dream while it was _occurring_. She calmed her breath, calmed her mind, calmed her heart, sat up in bed and tried to stop her hands from shaking. This was the first time she had her had an upper hand in a dream. This was the first time she had the chance to react with violence before he struck her. Somehow, it only made her feel worse.

What was this horrible feeling that kept building up in her chest? She was no stranger to anger, no stranger to the desire to hit—she had hit Malfoy before, after all—but this anger was different, it was deeper, it was mean and cruel and it made her wish for horrible, horrible things.

It was his fault, she realized. And she knew everything in the dream was just that, a dream, nothing more, but she couldn't help but wonder, couldn't help but question everything he had said. Was it true? Was he in her head now? Was he the source of this sick and terrible anger that plagued her? Was he truly there in her dreams, taunting her, torturing her? It was more than her losing her mind, more than her stress and lack of sleep—he was there with her always, following her around like her shadow, a dark and horrible monster that had latched itself to her mind and taken over. This was all his fault—her fight with Ron, her distance from her friends—all of this was his bloody fault, and she—

She couldn't take it anymore. She had to know. She couldn't wait for Malfoy to find those books for her so she could destroy him—she had to know now before she completely lost herself, before this ugly anger took over and she turned into _him_ , she _had_ to.

She was fueled by her desperation and lack of sleep and the fear that still remained from her nightmare. She certainly wasn't thinking straight, she was barely awake, taking the things that had happened in her dream for reality, but none of that stopped her from digging in her trunk for that book and holding it in her hands. She was startled by how warm it felt, hot and pulsing almost as if it was alive, as if its magic—his magic—was reading out for her, desperate and wanting and angry to have been kept waiting. It felt like him, left a strange, tingling feeling in her fingertips when she held it, and she wondered if it had always felt like this and she hadn't noticed, if it had always felt so alive, so human.

She crawled onto her bed, fighting with the skirts of her dress robes. She pulled the curtains shut and opened the diary, and she sliced her thumb on the edge of the page deliberately, letting the blood drip onto the page in uneven droplets, watching them fade into nothingness.

Then she saw nothing but white.

—

 **sO WHATS UP IM A BITCH**

 **listen….like im sO SORRY**

 **its just that time of year u kno? Christmas was crazy busy and then new years was crazy busy and now i have like 4 essays due at the end of january so like I'm a meSS i really shouldn't even be writing thIS like I'm the wORST idek how loNG ITS BEEN its just been like a liFETIME ITS BEEN BAD FOR ME TOO GUYS I MISS IT**

 **SO IM BACK (sort of kind of might not be permanent)**

 **point is I posted sOMETHIGN! so…..yay? ? ? ? ? anyway like i said I have maNY essays so i might go off the radar a little bit after this but i'm REALLY HOPING that in february I can get back to my super quick update schedule like I used to do? because come february I will (hopefully) have more time on my hands to write! knowing me tho i might update before then if I'm procrastinating on my essays idek man ideK**

 **but anyway…i know tom wasn't actually in this chapter except for hermione's dream tom which…isn't the same…..? ? ? like wow i get it u disappear 4 a month and us come back with thiS BUT LISTEN TOM WILL BE IN THE NEXT CHAPTER LIKE FIRST THING it just didn't fit with teh flow if i crammed him in the end of this chapter too u feel? ? ? DO U FEEL ME PLS DONT HATE ME IM NOT ENJOYING UR PAIN lmao i need 2 chill**

 **I just missed writing and posting so much, so I hope this is up to par and i hope you guys like it even though this chapter was a little slow going. I also forgot how frustrating it is to post a single chapter to a story that has like so many unanswered questions that I haven't even begun to address like I'm a lil mad at this but hey wuts new lmaooooooooooo**

 **shoot I'm rambling listen thank you all so much for all of your support and comments and favorites and follows and thanks for all your patience! I know how frustrating it is when an author takes forever to update but life is life and i appreciate those of you who haven't lost interest yet! I'm kind of exited for this story and I'm excited to share it with you guys and see what you think so i know this chapter was kind of uneventful but i would still love to hear what you think! !**

 **lots of love and yaayyyy I'm not dead guys I'm alive! ! ! ! love you lots i'll see you soon**


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